Continued from Search Engine Friendly Web Development Part 1 …
If you have a huge website with over 100 pages you need all of these pages indexed in Google. Now there are a number of ways to do this but it can and should be done in the development stage.
If you think you need to submit your site to search engines to get indexed then you are wrong. Many dodgy web development companies sell this service which is bad. Search engines work by using spiders (a program that searches for web pages) to search every webpage on the internet. So if you have a website and want to get it indexed all you need to do is put a link on another indexed page. When the spider comes along it will check the whole page and look for any changes, if your site is suddenly on there it will follow the link and then follow any more links from your webpage and index them. Now as long as your site is built well and all the pages can easily be found from the home page the spider will go off and index every page on your website.
The best way to get all of your sites web pages indexed is to link to them all from your site. For example if you are talking about a product on one page but then another product, do not just mention it, link to it. Now do not just put a link saying click here to see whatever, actually clickable bit words have that describe the page.
Ever wondered why Wikipedia comes up top in Google. Well to put it simple it is SEO genius. The site is built for search engines. By the way SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which is a marketing technique to get your site to come up naturally in Google. Well Wiki is pure perfection when it comes to SEO and the structure of the site. Every page links to every other page and has keywords in the hyperlinks which tell a search engine what that page is about. Brilliant!
Another important issue to implement at the development stage is the meta tags, mainly the title tag. The biggest mistake I see is that every page on a website is indexed but all the pages are named the same. Usually it's something like 'Welcome to Clayton's Shoes ….' Even the page on women's shoes is called 'Welcome to Clayton's shoes' … Utter madness! This is fine if you are a huge brand like Virgin, but if you're a small company in Wales that only a few people have heard off, it is not going to bring in much traffic. Your site needs to have unique titles for every page, because I take it every page is different right? If not then it should not be there.
The sad thing is that I see poor sites all the time and I am told how the owner spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a site that is useless. A bit like buying a Ferrari with clapped out fiat engine, looks fab and shinny on the outside but will not go! So do not make the same mistake many website owners have made. Make sure you do some research, speak to many people, and ask for examples of working sites, and eventually do not spend too much, there is no need, every bit of code that makes things work on the net is free and a decent Web company will know this and not charge the earth. They should be just charging for their time implementing and tweaking the code to suite your needs. Remember like a working Ferrari with a top notch engine, it still will not go without petrol. The same can be said of websites, without marketing it will not move, but including you have a SEO friendly site (decent engine) is half the battle.