Names AT Names - Domain Name Information Site

There are some key issues related to Internet and search engine marketing which you need to understand and solutions to implement for which you need to plan ahead. Planning before jumping into work can save a lot of time and possibly money in the future, as the wrong decisions might need restructuring for your site in order to render your site visible in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

Help Search Engines to Crawl Your Website

Search engines view sites as we used to do back in the early 1990's, when the web was graphicless. Those who were using the Internet at the time may recall the Lynx browser, one of the first text-only web browsers. Lynx is a perfect example of how a search engine views your website.

Avoid using HTML and Javascript structural elements which are widely considered as search engine unfriendly. Things like frames and javascript links (as opposed to clean HTML links) are things to avoid. Another issue is when using Flash. Some search engines can read text in a SWF file. However they will likely find it difficult to understand your navigation and consequtively your website's architecture.

Site URLs and Keywords in the URL

Although this site does not use this technique, it may boost your rankings in the SERPs if the URLs of the pages you publish have some of their important keywords in their URLs. Avoid overstuffing the URLs with keywords and plan in advance how your URLs will look like.

If at some stage you change your mind and change the URLs of your site, you may well bump into trouble especially from the biggest search engine in the industry. Simply don't do it. That is a friendly advice which you can only find out by yourself if you get penalised.

It always helps if the domain name you choose has your main keyword included. It can considerably help search engines understand what your site is about. Matt Cutts, one of Google's senior engineers has advised webmasters to separate words in the URL in the following format:

domain.com/keyword1-keyword2.html

Instead of:

domain.com/keyword1_keyword2.html

The second URL makes Google understand keyword1_keyword2 as one word.

Titles and META Descriptions for your Content

Each page you want to be indexed by the search engines needs to have a unique Title (E.g.: the tag in the HEAD section of the HTML code. It also needs a unique description in the META Description field.

Try to use as unique titles and descriptions as possible to avoid any duplication penalties.

It is NOT a good idea to have ALL the pages of your site included in each search engine's index. If you use a CMS system, like Drupal you need to be carefull and ensure that each page is accessible by a SINGLE URL and not 3 or 4 different ones. You need to setup the correct instructions in your robots.txt file to exclude all these pages from the crawl. This can save you in bandwidth charges as well.

Simple Techniques for Search Engine Healthy Websites

Following these simple concepts, you can have significantly higher chances of getting more organic search engine traffic. That is pretty much all the important information you need to consider before starting the development of your website and possibly get a good reward if your Internet marketing efforts start to pay off.