When designing your site, there are two things that should always stay in the forefront of the design process, the visitors experience and the search engines experience. Your site may look cool with all of those nifty java applets and flash animations, but the question you should ask yourself is: How easy is it for a search engine spider to navigate?

Remember that the spiders cannot read what’s printed on a graphic or image, and it may not be sophisticated enough to traverse a java styled menu. Both of these scenarios will hurt your ability to get properly indexed and thus impossible to achieve the ranking required for a really successful website.

Planning for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

SEO Site Structure

Also extremely important is how your site is structured. Your menu system should include a link to a detailed site map, visitors rarely visit these but spiders love them! Your directory and file names should contain words relating to the topics of the pages they contain. Example:

http://xyz.com/pages/index.html would not be a good example of an SEO directory structure.

http://xyz.com/help-guides/computer-help.html is a great example of an SEO directory structure.

Notice how the – separates the words in the directory name and the page name, the search engine will treat them as separate words instead of one word. ex: computerhelp.html. By placing the Keywords in the directory structure and the file name, you increase your likelihood of a better ranking dramatically.

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Dynamic vs. Static Websites

A Dynamic website is a site which generates pages based on user interaction. Such websites usually consist of

• A Site Template – This is a page that contains the html information for producing the menu, background, header (logo) and footer (copyright information) which is used throughout the site. It will also contain lines of code (asp, php) which will allow it to display information pulled from either a separate file or a
• Database – Central storage location for all the information that needs to be delivered to make the page that the user requests. This can be articles, locations to other files, usernames, basically any text or numbers which your site needs to function.