Recently, we’ve been focusing on important factors that can affect your Web site’s visibility in the search engines. Last month, we focused on the keyword use in your Web page’s copy. This month, a page’s accessibility (e.g. 404 error pages, redirects, and other technical issues).

This is more of an accessibility rather than a ranking issue. Some situations can include:

• If pages have been indexed by the engines, are then re-named or deleted, the user will get an error
• If Web hosting is unreliable with regular server mis-haps, the user will have an inconsistent experience
• Redesigning a Web site, changing page structure and naming without correct redirecting scripts (e.g. 301 redirects)
• If a 404 error page is not “dressed up” to help them navigate forward (use a Site Map), people will click the BACK button and move on
• If an incorrect—or worse still, none at all— declaration statement at the head of your Web page is used, the Web browser (e.g. Firefox or Internet Explorer) may not display the page correctly
• Flash-based Web sites are notoriously difficult for search engines to “spider” because of a lack of links; a Flash site is a self-contained “movie”, not a series to Web pages connected by text- or image-based links
• Streamlining code allows search engines to more easily spider, index, and rank web pages
• Providing ALT tags on images so people with images off can still navigate a page
• Specifying the language of a document (or of text within a document) helps search engines decide in which index(es) to place it

And finally, helping people with visibility or other disabilities to read your Web site opens up it’s accessibility to all people.

Next month, we’ll focus on #5: links to a single page from site-internal pages.

DIGG THIS PAGE!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 29th, 2007 at 3:50 pm.