Creating a Crawler-Friendly Site

As a web developer and designer myself, I understand how sometimes it is very tempting to make a beautiful site with a lot of eye candies and design elements. If you are creating a site to be SEO friendly, however, you need to make sure that all necessary aspects are properly considered. In this part, we are going to talk about how to make your site crawler-friendly.

Keep in mind that search engine crawlers cannot read JavaScript navigation and links. They also can’t understand search your site, interpret graphics and Flash page elements, and also cannot fill out forms. In order to make your site crawler-friendly, you need to use these elements properly.

I’m not saying that you can’t use design elements and scripts to make your site look nice, but you do need to add alternative means of navigating through your site effectively so that the search engine crawler can still review your site thoroughly. One of the most commonly-used tricks is to place a complete set of site navigation on the footer of each page.

You can also develop a sitemap and submit it to the search engine you are registering your site to. By submitting a comprehensive yet accurate sitemap, the crawler can explore your site based on the sitemap and you will have all essential pages properly crawled.

One last thing you can do is to use CSS instead of plain JavaScript and add “alt” tag on each design element you use so that the search engine crawler can still recognize them accordingly.