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Some site architecture issues to consider that can have an effect on the search engine optimization of your site pages are listed below.

On-page JavaScript

Search engine spiders don’t see web pages the way a human does. Search engine spiders see a code level view, which they then parse for content. From those parsed pieces, they then begin the process of determining what your page is about. And, if you have never seen JavaScript programming before, it is very complex and can have major negative impact in determining the theme of your page - especially with regards to SEO.

It’s generally accepted best practice, for effective SEO, to limit the amount of JavaScript hard-coded into the page itself. Ideally, you want the search engine spider to encounter the actual body content as soon as possible, and you want to present the content as a unified whole. That means minimizing the JavaScript in the page, especially JavaScript that occurs before the content.

To search engine spiders, this is clutter, and while they ignore it, they still need to parse through it to find the real content of the page. Many spiders have timeouts or maximum character counts associated with them - if they have to parse through too much, they’ll abandon the page.

Key Considerations In Using JavaScript on Your Site

• Avoid making pages too top heavy by placing too much code between the tags.
• Avoid breaking the continuity of your body content by inserting JavaScript.
• Put JavaScripts in external files and link to them.
• Avoid JavaScript navigation and menus - whenever possible use text navigation for best practice SEO.

You’ll be creating an SE-friendly page while also making your markup cleaner and your web site management easier.

Flash

Like JavaScript, flash is not seen by the search engines and therefore its content is not effectively crawled or indexed - so anything contained within flash, including navigation links and page content is invisible to the search engines.

While using flash on a website is not all bad and can be a nice addition to an otherwise bland web site, a good rule of thumb with flash: less is more.

Having less flash occupying a site page is better and avoid placing important content within flash - and especially avoid using flash for site navigation menus.

Positioning the flash on your site is also an SEO best practice consideration. Keep the flash to smaller areas on the page and avoid placing flash on prime “SEO” site real estate like: top left and any site navigation

Key Considerations In Using Flash on Your Site

• Minimize flash usage on site pages
• Avoid embedding important content within flash
• Avoid using flash in “prime SEO site real estate” areas (i.e. top left)
• Avoid using flash for any site navigation

Using flash is not bad - provided it is used correctly. Keeping in mind that flash is not SEO friendly, if used properly with strategic placement, flash on a site page can be a good advertising message delivery.

Mouseovers

Instead of JavaScript mouseovers, try using the hover feature of CSS to highlight links. As detailed earlier, Javascript can interrupt spider interpretation of your page theme and can cause problems with spider tracking through your website. CSS can provide all these same features and provide the best in search engine friendly design.

Layout and Tables

Overuse of tables for content positioning can create web pages containing tables embedded four or more deep to accommodate the design — and all the good content ends up inside the inner-most embedded tables. From a technical perspective, search engine spiders can read tables, and even embedded tables, but once a design gets to be more than about three tables deep, most spiders run into problems.

There are still questions amongst the industry professionals as to why this occurs. Some speculation is, like java script, many spiders have timeouts or maximum character counts associated with them - if they have to parse through too much, they’ll abandon the page, it’s simply too much code for them to keep track of or the search engine thinks you placed that content deep in the page because it’s not important. Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be an issue if the follow techniques are followed:

• Avoid unnecessary tables where possible
• Limit your table embedding to a depth of three
• Where possible avoid tables and use CSS to define position. This makes for a much cleaner design and has the bonus of being easier to manage

When considering website design or re-design, strategically plan the website architecture to have a search-engine-friendly site architecture. The long-term benefits of an optimized architectural design will totally outweigh any extra time in planning.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 2:28 pm and is filed under SEO | . You can follow responses to this entry through the Comments RSS Feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your site.