The importance of crawlable websites

| Web design

The importance of crawlable websites

Google occasionally throw around the term “SEO-friendly websites” by this they mean a website with good site architecture. Why having good site architecture is considered as ‘SEO-friendly’ is because it allows Google spiders to crawl the site quickly and easily.

Search engines are constantly crawling and searching your website, trying to categorise your pages. If the site architecture is poor, the search engine may not be able to find what they are looking for and rank you down because of it.

So what practices can confuse the search engines?

Flash:

Not all Flash websites have poor site architecture; experienced coders can make Flash websites that search engines can crawl. The problem is that most Flash designers don’t take the time to code the sites properly for search engines to crawl them.

This makes the search engines blind, so they have no choice but to rank the website poorly.

In my experience even Flash websites that have been coded properly don’t perform as well as HTML websites.

Image text:

Images can’t be seen by search engines, meaning when web designers just stick an image on the website and do not give it the correct alt text the search engine can’t see what the image is. The website to a user will look fine, but search engines won’t see these images, meaning you will miss out on text and appear less attractive to the search engines.

Dodgy coding:

With coding there are lots of complex ways to create simple stuff. Search Engines like the simplest code possible, as it quick and easy for them to read.

Frames:

iFrames were used to keep content in a certain place on the website. Nowadays, they are very out-dated and useless for SEO. The major problem with iFrames is that they pull content from another file that search engines are unable to access.

If your content is in an iFrame, the search engine crawler won’t see any of your content therefore will be unable to rank you.

How to avoid poor site architecture?

The best way to avoid poor site architecture is to keep your website simple, don’t try and complicate it with lots of flash or buttons everywhere. You can make your website unique in different ways.