The Art of SEO, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER SIX

Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

In this chapter, we will examine ways to assess the search engine friendliness of your website. A search engine–friendly website, at the most basic level, is one that allows for search engine access to site content—and having your site content accessible to search engines is the first step toward creating prominent visibility in search results. Once your site’s content is accessed by a search engine, it can then be considered for relevant positioning within search results pages.

As we discussed in the introduction to Chapter 2, search engine crawlers are basically software programs, and like all software programs, they come with certain strengths and weaknesses. Publishers must adapt their websites to make the job of these software programs easier—in essence, leverage their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. If you can do this, you will have taken a major step toward success with SEO.

Developing an SEO-friendly site architecture requires a significant amount of thought, planning, and communication due to the large number of factors that influence how a search engine sees your site and the myriad ways in which a website can be put together, as there are hundreds (if not thousands) of tools that web developers can use to build a website—many of which were not initially designed with SEO or search engine crawlers in mind.

Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines

The first step in the SEO design process is ...