Every Web designer attempts to target their sites for visitors. It’s the whole purpose of having a Web site in the first place. There is a second audience however that is often ignored: search engines. When initially designing a Web site, it is important to consider both. I’ve reviewed hundreds of Web sites planning SEO strategies and there are three extremely common errors made by designers that can drastically limit the search engines’ ability to properly index and assess the site.

1.) Flash / JavaScript Navigations

It’s no secret that search engines have trouble spidering certain links. The goal should always be to make things as easily as possible for the search engine spiders. Though Flash navigations may look nice, they generally are not spidered well. Links in JavaScript are not spidered at all. The engines do not render pages, they only look at code. As a rule of thumb, all links on the site should appear as standard HTML. Text links are optimal. Image links are spiderable, but not as effective for SEO. Image maps are spiderable, but are sometimes a unpredictable.

We always recommend drop down navigations to increase internal linking, but is it important that the links themselves are not in JavaScript. It is always ok to use JS to power animation or appearance, but the links themselves should be in basic HTML. Usually, a good dropdown menu will use CSS in conjunction with JS to provide a good, spiderable menu system.

2.) Poor Architecture

There is nothing harder to change after-the-fact than poor architecture. If the site is built on a poor foundation, there is only so much you can do to fix it without redesigning. It is of dire importance that good internal linking and prominence be considered prior to designing a site. Because the search engines try to view a site’s architecture as a user would, this should be Web marketing 101, but some sites still struggle with this. Here are the rules you should always abide by:

• Ensure that all important pages are easy to get to and are no more than 3 clicks from the home page. If pages are hard to get to or involve a lot of searching, the search engines will see these pages as unimportant to the site. They’re not stupid. They know if it takes 10 clicks to get to, it’s not being pushed to users.
• Ensure that all links to important pages are in prominent locations on the site. It is not enough to have easily-accessible pages. Important pages will always be linked to from a high position in the code. For example, a link to a category page from the top navigation will get more internal authority than a page linked from the footer. This is why CSS dropdown menus are so effective in a top navigation.
• Main navigations should be site-wide. If you decide to make mini navigations that apply to individual sections of the site and use no consistent main navigation, you run the risk of creating bottle necks on the site. This essentially causes certain pages to be accessible only through specific other pages/sections. All main category pages and important pages should support each other; not just the pages in the category they are in.

3.) Splash Home Page / Splitter Page

Splash pages can completely kill a site’s internal linking. The home page of a site is given the most authority and links on them are very valuable. The rationale is that any page linked from the home page (which has limited space) must be a very important page for users. If you place a splash page on your site instead of a home page, then you are dramatically reducing the potential internal link authority of the site. The home page should be a portal to the site…not an intermediary page in front of a pseudo home page. This is compounded even worse when the splash page is really a splitter page with an HTML form. Pages like these attempt to split incoming traffic into mini sites.

For example, a site that has a consumer and corporate section might place a splitter page in the root that asks the user to choose which version of the site they want to visit. If we were to place this choice inside a dropdown HTML form, we would literally have the worst possible home page. HTML forms are not spiderable. This practice is commonly seen with sites that have international/language versions of a site. When going to the home page you are prompted to choose a language with an HTML form and redirected to the applicable version of the site. VERY bad idea.

4.) Non-spiderable / Non-existent Text Content

It is not that uncommon to find sites that have the vast majority of their text content in Flash, JavaScript, images, called via an IFRAME, or just completely missing. It’s nearly impossible to rank (with the exception of using heavy inbound link manipulation) a page that doesn’t even mention the keywords once in a form that is visible by the engines. It may look good to have your content written in script through the use of images, but the engines cannot read it and you won’t get credit for it.

If you cannot determine what is visible and isn’t to the engines, use one of the many online spider simulator tools. They basically strip out the visible text content and show you what the spiders see. Some good ones are:

http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/spider-simulator/

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

http://tools.summitmedia.co.uk/spider/

We’re very pleased to announce that the new TreeHouse SEM site is now live!  It’s been a long process determining how we wanted to wanted to lay out the site, but we are confident it will be easier to navigate and provide much more useful information.  We want to send out a special thanks to Aldryn and Guissella for working the long hours to get everything up between client projects.

Our next step is TreeHouse Labs.  This is being built with the intention of being the single best place on the Web for training material related to SEO.  Over time, we want to expand it to also incorporate design and development best practices to form a complete resource for Web identity.  Stay tuned for more updates as we complete new portions of the site!

http://www.treehousesem.com/

The new TreeHouse SEM site is finally in Beta. We should have something up in the next couple of days. Our goal is to provide as much content as possible in as easy a manner as possible, but that’s not as simple as it may sound. We are in the process of generating as much content as we can while ensuring the site looks proper in all browsers (which is a whole project in and of itself). Internet Explorer 6 is nothing but a problem when it comes to CSS, png files, and JS. We should have it working properly in IE6 shortly and then we’ll feel confident enough to launch the site.

Here’s a sneak peek of the new site going live VERY shortly now. We’re working on the final touch ups and the site will be up and running. We look forward to hearing your feedback on the site!