Web Genius Blog

In the previous post about getting traffic from Google and the other search engines, I mentioned that the first aspect was to make sure your site has a "search engine friendly architecture."

Nowadays there are far too many web pages on the internet, as well as far too many searches taking place, to make it cost effective for humans to review content and decide which pages rank the highest.

For this reason search engines have automated software robots, called spiders, which trawl through the internet bringing back content to the search engine's database.

When you consider that Google regularly spiders over 8 billion web pages, you begin to understand why it is important you make it as easy as possible for their spider (called "GoogleBot") to get in, find your content and then go on its merry way.

Having a spider-friendly website is actually very simple, which is surprising given the number of sites which fail to provide for even the basics.

The most important aspect is to make your content accessible within only a few clicks of your home page. The easiest way to achieve this is to have a Site Map link on your home page. Your Site Map page then includes links to every other page on your site.

This way, when the spider finds your home page, it will quickly find your site map and then have access to all your remaining content. Simple as that!

Other factors to consider when building a search engine friendly site are to beware of certain technologies like frames, Flash, Javascript and dynamic URLs. I will talk about some of these traps in future posts.

The good news for Web Genius clients, of course, is that Web Genius sites are built to be highly accessible to both spiders and humans alike.

Our automatic site map functionality is very welcoming to spiders and our unique heirarchical menu systems and internal search features make sure that your human visitors can easily find what they are after.