subject: How To Use Domain Names, Url's, And Other Web Mastery For Seo [print this page] There are many parts to making a website that has good Search Engine Optimization. Thats why most people hire an SEO Consultant as many of the points to making a high ranked website depend on how well you know the structure of a website and the building of a website. There are many important things to remember when trying to attract web crawlers.
Of course a website that is not accessible or has pages that are not accessible will not get a very good ranking. A website can become inaccessible if it has broken links or has areas that have password protection, or any number of other issues that can cause this problem. This makes the website impossible to index by web crawlers. Along with inaccessibility comes downtime. This is when the hosting of your website isnt reliable and is often down. As web crawlers come to your website once every one or two months, and visit when the website is down, then it cannot be indexed and your rank will either drop or website disappear altogether. An unreliable provider will have no less than 2-3% downtime.
A great way to get higher ranking is by having a simple sitemap. It doesnt matter if you have one especially made by Google or a regular HTML one, as long as its there. A sitemap is basically a webpage that has a detailed map of your website including links, pages, and its entire structure. The size of your website is also a good way to attract web crawlers. Often, the bigger the better, however, make sure that you understand that the smaller the website the more user friendly it is. A large website makes it hard to navigate and confusing. Sometimes its better to separate a large website into a couple of smaller ones.
Many rankings are based on the age of a website. This is basically due to the belief that if a website has been around for a longer time, it is trusted and more reliable. An old website has more of a chance to stay online much longer due to its track record, while a newer website may close quickly, depending on who is running it. Its just not as reliable. Another way to keep the attention of web crawlers is through a theme. Its a great way to improve your ranking. By having a whole website with the same theme all of the web pages will get a boost in rank.
Domain names also play a major role in a website. Keep in mind that its much better to have a separate domain name rather than a sub domain. If your website has a sub domain, register a separate one. This will make it easier for web crawlers to find and index your website. The type of domain name is also important as there are different levels. The best of course to have is the .edu, .org, or .gov domain names. They attract the most attention. Next are the .com and .net, and lastly the .ws, .biz. and .info among others.
The way you structure your websites URL also make a difference in the ranking of a website. By using hyphens in between words in the URL the website becomes more readable. This is important both in the domain name as well as the rest of the URL. Having a readable website mans higher rankings. The length of the URL plays a role as well. Its not as important however, having too long of a URL looks suspicious and may be written off as spam. A good rule of thumb is no more than 10 words total. Approximately no more than 3-4 words for the domain and 6-7 words for the rest of the URL in order to keep it within reason.
Dynamic URLs are basically when a page is only a template, which brings up different type of information depending on what the searcher clicked or wrote within the webpage. Its basically database driven and runs a script. These are not really good because the URL itself is really long, its especially bad if its over 100 characters. Its best to have a Static URL which is basically a simple webpage, the contents stay the same, and therefore the URL is always the same. There are tools that you can use to rewrite a dynamic URL to be more appealing to both humans and web crawlers.
There are a couple of things that you need to avoid when creating your website if you want good rankings. Session IDs are not very beneficial to your website as they keep web crawlers cannot read a website that has them. A session ID is basically an ID that is given to each user that goes into the website. Something else you need to avoid is a roots.txt ban, which is basically a protection from bots on your website for certain or all pages. This is good for robots that search websites in order to gather information for spammers and hackers, however, its definitely not good SEO. With this you block spiders from reaching parts of a website, and in many cases, if a web crawler is blocked from part of a website, then most likely will visit the rest of the website less and less until eventually it doesnt anymore.
Lastly, redirects must be avoided as well. This is when you click on a link and when you reach the website or page you are immediately redirected to another page. There are many issues that arise with redirects and often dont work properly, which means that that particular page or website will not be visible to a web crawler as attached to yours. Another problem that comes with redirects is that it looks like a black hat technique. This is a major issue as you can get your websites ranking dropped or even removed from a search engine.
Overall, its very important to know how to build a website as well as how to apply URLs, domain names, as well as how to create them properly in order to get the best Search Engine Optimization. This is why many people hire SEO Consultants, as they are professionals and know both websites and search engines well enough to get the highest ranking for your website.
