If your website doesn't comply with the basic rules of search engine friendly web-design, then all your attempts at achieving any success in the engines will be a waste of time.

The importance of building websites so they're search-engine friendly is still widely underestimated; too many webmasters still think that a few meta-tags and a search engine submission campaign is all they need to be successful.

All the internal navigation links should be coded as plain HTML links. Links coded using JavaScript are not followed by the search engine spiders. The same is true for links embedded in Flash objects. If the site has JavaScript or Flash based there should be an alternative navigation bar in plain HTML.

All internal links pointing to the home page of the site should link to "/" or "http://www.seosapien.com/". Any sort of "index.html", "default.asp" or "main.jsp" in the URLs of those internal links introduce unnecessary problems like the duplicate content problem and split page's authority. It's been reiterated and discussed thousands of times all over the SEO forum circuit.

Dynamic URLs are not necessarily bad, though static URLs are, of course, better. Important rules, often neglected, which would be "no "id" letters in parameter names" and "no session ID parameters for guest visitors". The naming convention of dynamic parameters is the easiest thing to fix; the only thing required here is to know and remember about the rule.

Another way to scare a spider away is to require that the user-agent supports cookies - and refuse to serve any content unless cookies are enabled. Since the engines' bots don't support cookies, they will just go away.

Labels: search_engines