Rewriting the Beginner’s Guide: Part 4 - The Basics of Search Engine Friendly Design & Development
Posted by randfish
For the next few weeks, I’m working on re-authoring and re-building the Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here.
Search engines, as we’ve shown above, are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content to retrieve and display in the results. In this section of the guide, we’ll focus on the specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they’re optimally structured for search engines and human visitors. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in the site’s construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.
Indexable Content
In order to be listed in the search engines, your content - the material available to visitors of your site - must be in HTML text content. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:
Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attribues” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content Images can also be shown to visitors as replacements for text by using CSS styles Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page Video & Audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines
Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like SEO-Browser, a website that lets you see web pages the same way search engine spiders do, you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.
For example, below, I have an image of SEOmoz’s homepage:
The visual images of the Seattle skyline and the graphic elements give the page a great look and feel, but let’s see what the search engines can access:
Using the SEO Browser site, we’re able to see that to a search engine, SEOmoz’s homepage is simply a collection of text and links (which is exactly what we’d want to see).
Now let’s check out another favorite site of mine, Orisinal, a clever collection of wonderfully designed, Flash-based games.
The graphics are great, but there’s not a lot of text on the page - it just says “Orisinal games.” Perhaps that’s all the page needs to rank for?
Uh oh… Via SEO Browser, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There’s not even text telling us that the page contains the Orisinal Games. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games.
If you’re curious about exactly what terms and phrases search engine can see on a webpage, SEOmoz has a nifty tool called “Term Extractor” that will display words & phrases ordered by frequency. However, it’s wise to not only check for text content but to also use a tool like SEO Browser to double-check that the pages you’re building are visible to the engines. It’s very hard to rank if you don’t even appear in the keyword databases 
Crawlable Link Structures
On an individual page, search engines need to see content in order to list pages in their massive keyword-based indices. They also need to have access to a crawlable link structure - one that lets their spiders browse the pathways of a website - in order to find all of the pages on a website. Hundreds of thousands of sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obsfucating their navigation in ways that search engines cannot access, thus impacting their ability to get pages listed in the search engines’ indices. Below, I’ve illustrated how this problem can happen:
In the example above, Google’s colorful spider has reached page “A” and sees links to pages “B” and “E.” However, even though C & D might be important pages on the site, the spider has no way to reach them (or even know they exist) because no direct, crawlable links point to those pages. As far as Google is concerned, they might as well not exist - great content, good keyword targeting, and smart marketing won’t make any difference at all if the spiders can’t reach those pages in the first place.
To start, let’s take a quick look at the anatomy of a standard HTML link:
In the above illustration, the “
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