Search friendly development

Published by Ben | Filed under SEO, Events

Amplify Interactive’s notes from SMX Advanced Seattle 2008

This session dealt with some of the common web site development issues that impact search engine crawling & indexing of your site, which can have a big impact on your site’s presence & ranking in search engines.

Amplify Interactive audits every single client web site for these issues when performing site audits during our research & recommendations phase. We also educate the developers & designers that our clients work with on these issues when they are developing or redesigning client sites.

Nathan Buggia - Microsoft

Some things to pay attention to for your site:

• Load times - the faster your pages load, the more of your site that a search engine will crawl
• All flash sites and using cloaking as a workaround = bad (he used an example from Nike, who apparently does a lot of this)

Sharad Verma - Yahoo

Web site development & search engine considerations

• Search engines don’t speak javascript, turn off JS in browser & navigate your site to look for issues (I give this tip in every SEO speaking session that I do)
• All flash/video = bad; text & links = better
• Dynamic urls - lead to duplicate content & splits link juice, less likely to be crawled & indexed
• 301 redirect dynamic to static, limit the number of paramaters

Use Yahoo Site Explorer & other search engine webmaster tools

• Rewrite dynamic urls through yahoo site explorer
• Tell yahoo about dynamic urls & remove session id’s etc
• We’ll aggregate link weights

Duplicate content

• Less effective crawl
• Search engines are less likely to extract links…
• Solve by using 301 or disallow duplicate content via robots.txt

Best practices

• Flatten folder structure - deeper content (meaning, multiple directories in your URLs) is less likely to be indexed
• Redirect old pages
• Use keywords in urls
• Use sub domains ONLY when appropriate
• Remove file extension from URL if you can (.asp, .html, etc)
• Use robots.txt exclusion to eliminate content from indexing - see http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000587.htm

Maile Ohye - Google

Develop a crawlable architecture for rich media

• Build on html, then add ajax & flash to enhance html version of site
• Alternate versions aren’t a good alternative, splits link juice & user experience (can’t share the same thing etc)
• YouTube is a good example of progressive enhancement: they put one “thing” (video) on each page, the site navigation is in html, they put descriptive html content next to rich media
• Consider sIFR for flash: text matches content seen by enabled users, accessible to screen readers and search engines (see Google Webmaster blog “Best uses of flash” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with flash…”)
• Alternate for AJAX: consider Hijax for AJAX (see Google Webmaster blog “A spider’s view of Web 2.0” & Google Webmaster Central help “Working with AJAX enhanced sites“)

Tips to improve the indexing of your site

• Set preferred domain to www or non-www, then 301 redirect to the other
• Reduce duplicate content by keeping URLs clean: remove unnecessary paramaters, internally link to your preferred version, store visitor information in cookies rather than session id’s
• Planning server downtime for maintenance? Make sure you serve a 503 not a 404

Related Links & Coverage

SMX on Twitter
Search Engine Roundtable recap