Design and content play a very important role in your SEO success, and by following as many of the rules as possible implemented by Google, your website stands a far better chance of being successfully crawled by search engine web crawlers and ranked positively.
In this guide we’re going to concentrate on the technical aspect of web design that should be followed in order to ensure that your website is as SEO optimised as possible:
Crawling
In order for Google to understand the contents of your website you should allow all of your website’s assets to be crawled (including CSS and JavaScript). In doing so, Google’s indexing system renders any web pages using the HTML of a page, along with its assets such as CSS, images and JavaScript files.
You can see the page assets that Googlebot is unable to crawl and debug directives in your robots.txt file using this link and this link.
Session IDs and URL Arguments
You should also allow search bots to crawl through your website without the need for session IDs or URL arguments. This is because by implementing session IDs/URL arguments, search engine web crawlers encounter issues when crawling through your site, particularly with trying to index your site. Specifically, web crawlers find it difficult to eliminate URLs that look different but actually point to the same page.
If-Modified-Since
Another important area of consideration is the If-Modified-Since header. The If-Modified-Since HTTP header informs search engine spiders whether or not your webpage has changed since it was last crawled, and if it has changed, the spider can download it again with the new information. But if your web server does not support this feature then the crawler is unable to perform this simple activity. It’s important that this feature is supported in order to save you bandwidth and overhead.
Robots.txt
Robots need to be instructed when they visit your website and they do this more easily if you make use of the robots.txt file on your web server. You don’t have to make use of this feature, but it is a good idea to do so if crawling of your content has become an issue for your server or if you want to instruct crawlers about which directories to crawl. Robots.txt can also be used to prevent crawlers from crawling search results pages or any automatically generated pages, as these pages do not bring much value to users who are coming from search engines. You can check out this robots.txt analysis tool to ensure your robots.txt file is being used correctly.
Advertisements and Content Management Systems
Advertisements should not affect your search engine rankings so be sure to implement measures that protect you from this. For instance, Google’s AdSense ads and DoubleClick ads are blocked from being crawled by robots.txt files. Furthermore, if your company uses a Content Management System, make sure that your chosen system creates links and pages that search engines are able to crawl.
Testing
Websites should be frequently tested to ensure that they are performing optimally, that they load within one or two seconds and that they are compatible across all browsers. Slow sites diminish the user experience and quality of your website. Because each browser interprets your website’s code in a slightly different way, it could appeal differently to users across different browsers. Throughout the different stages of your site’s development you should continually test it on multiple browsers to ensure that it is delivering the ultimate user experience. Always write good, valid and clean HTML and CSS, and continue to test everything.
There are a number of tools available allowing you to test the speed of your website and monitor its performance. These tools display statistics about your web pages, grade them based on predetermined rules and offer suggestions for how to improve the performance of individual pages. You can test the speed of your website here, here and here.
These technical guidelines are simple to follow and could make a huge difference to your website’s success and performance.
For further information about how to successfully optimise your website and attract greater traffic, get in touch to discover how our professional web design services can generate more traffic to your site and enhance your overall ROI.
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