When building a site from the ground up, you are presented with a variety of things to do and technologies to use. But some of these technologies, though great for your audience are disastrous to SEO spiders.

If you are starting a new site you want it to be grounded with a firm foundation in good search engine… stuff.

The most friendly of web technologies is CSS. CSS not only is a great tool to use if you want to change things up a bit later down the road by using themes, but removes clutter from your page.

Cluttered Pages and You

A web site has two faces, one what we see and two the behind the sees stuff. What we see is a neat and tidy page with graphics and text laid out properly. The spider on the other hands sees all the programming tags.

An example of what you see:	And what Spiders See:

Big difference. A spider only cares about the html that goes into a page. It cannot see the pictures it cannot see the layout.

When checking the keywords that your page presents the spider counts all characters in your Body Text. If you Body Text is filled with

TIP: For a little extra spice, add a tag to the Flash site so the spiders won’t have to deal with it at all.

If you still need to have a Flash site and don’t want to make a separate HTML site, then make sure you have a menu that is in HTML. If you use Flash for your main menu then have an HTML menu at the bottom, it doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just links to the pertinent content.

There are some excellent uses for Flash. Since a spider does not look at the content of an embedded Flash file you can use this to your advantage. Say you have a cool little quote of the month thingy, but the quotes are not keyword specific and may even be dumbing down the keywords you are trying to target. Have no fear. You don’t have to remove it from your site, simply turn it into a Flash component and now the text will not be seen by spiders. This goes for any text that you do not want spiders to see.

Titles: A Rose by any other Meta Name would smell as sweet?

Like it or not, spiders care about the Meta Tag Title. It is the single most important tag period. So make it a good one. Keep it small and to the point with words that match your most important keyword terms.

TIP: Make your Meta Titles page specific. This can help you get more than just your index page ranked high.

Put some thought into it. Don’t just use your brand name or trademark. If you have a new product, company, or service this may be a great way to never place high in any keywords that matter. If I just opened Billy Bobbo’s Serverline and used that in the title I would be a loon. Instead use a title such as Discount Server Hosting, Dedicated Support for Dedicated hosting.

With that one title I hit multiple keyword terms and it even has a little salesiness to it for the living audience.

Portal Software and SEO

If you plan you use portal, blogging, or shopping cart software make sure it can do the following:

• Allow you to change META tags easily
• Use CSS
• Allow you to make unique Title Tags
• Allow you to generate RSS feeds from your content
• Doesn’t use Frames
• Carries a well organize structure
• Makes it easy for people to link to it
• Uses some sort of way to make SE friendly URLs

First three are a given, we have talked about them already. Feeds help get your content out and although they are not a part of SEO per se, they can help get your content to those who want it. And they can then link back to your site which will help out your SEO efforts.

Frames are bad. Frames can trap spiders. Spiders will sometimes go to the wrong sections or will only see on part of the site. This is bad so frames should be avoided. Just about 99% of all portal software does not use frames so nothing major to worry about really.

A well organized web site structure goes a long way to have spiders log every pertinent page on your site. So categories, sub-categories, keyword searches and keyword categories, tag clouds, etc. are all great things to have.

SEO is 60-80% dependent on your site and 40-20% dependent on people linking to you. You can change your site. You can swap Title Tags, change keywords within the body text, etc. But your at the end of that day that will only take you so far.

URLs mean something. A site called WebHostReview.com is perfect to target the keyword phrase Web Host Review. CheapWebSiteHostingforyou.com is excellent for targeting Cheap Web Site Hosting for you, Cheap Web Site, Cheap WebSite Hosting, Cheap Web Hosting, etc. Now compare the following:

CheapWebSiteHostingforyou.com/c=134&p=23&act=893

and

CheapWebSiteHostingforyou.com/BudgetHosting/Reviews

The second URL will not only take you to the same place (I made these up so don’t try to click on them), but adds extra possible keyword combinations for that page. Also places like Google put the keyword into bold wherever it is found in your search entry. If its in the description, the title text, and even in the URL.

That’s it for now, we still have much more to talk about. So stay tuned for more. Until then, Happy Hosting.