Competent Web Design Techniques
At the last count, the internet as a whole consisted
of an estimated 15 billion web pages.
Google reportedly holds approximately 8 billion pages within its index; this
number is growing.
To catalogue and keep this index up to date, Google employs a variety of ‘spiders’,
including the Googlebot (web page index), the Imagebot (picture files) and the
Mediabot (media files) amongst others.
Similarly, other search engines also use their own spiders to catalogue their
indexes.
What makes these search engine spiders so important?
Also known as ‘web crawlers’ or ‘bots’,
search engine spiders are amongst the most essential visitors
to any site since they index and classify its content
for inclusion in search engine databases.
It must be noted that these bots do not see pages in the
same manner human visitors do.
Rather than simply reading text and picture content, spiders
scour a page’s HTML code to extract usable information.
Consequently, poor web design techniques and coding standards
can prove to be a serious hindrance to their efforts,
sometimes causing them to give up entirely.
JavaScript especially is a severe impediment to search
engine spiders trying to index your site.
Any source code which is loaded with JavaScript is likely
to send bots running for cover without ever indexing the
page in question at all.
Other main culprits include incomplete paragraph tags
or missing image alt tags, none of which are likely to
cause a major disturbance to the average surfer, whilst
causing a real headache for web crawlers.
A question of balance?
Whilst designers must of course create sites with human
visitors in mind, they must also consider search engines
in the course of their efforts.
If a site is designed solely with search engine spiders
in mind it is likely to lead to a poor user experience
for human visitors, whereas if it is only geared towards
human viewers it is likely to suffer from poor search
engine rankings.
Balance can only be achieved through high standards of
code which provide a search engine friendly base, easily
indexed by web crawlers.
The perfect starting point is provided by the World Wide
Web Consortium (W3C), an organisation which has been setting
coding standards for the internet since 1994.
Although W3C Compliance is still a mystery to many web
designers, its importance to achieving long-term success
with the major search providers cannot be underestimated.
Anyone who has ever used Microsoft FrontPage™ will
know that a working knowledge of HTML is no longer necessary
to create a web page; the program does the hard work.
What most users fail to realise is that web design techniques
employing the use of such programs as Microsoft FrontPage™ or
Macromedia DreamWeaver™ tend to produce messy, non-compliant
code which may look great onscreen but can seriously hamper
the efforts of search engine spiders.
Competent Web Design ensures a search engine friendly
site
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