Intentionally. Online Business System Design

One of the most common pitfalls in search engine positioning is caused by the technology behind a site and the assumptions made by that technology.

As you probably know, search engines find content on your site primarily through a process of “crawling” - following links from page to page and indexing the content as it goes along. Given that, it makes sense that in order for search engines to find your content the pages must be directly linked to from other public facing pages.

You’d think that most content management systems or applications would do this, but that’s often not the case. Rather, many systems are designed without search engine optimization in mind and as a result the content is hidden or difficult to find. And sites that makes a search engine’s job harder often don’t get indexed.

The following is a rundown of the kinds of issues should you look for when diagnosing your site, evaluating a content management system or embarking on a web application development project. It is by no means exhaustive, but should help you identify and avoid many of the more common pitfalls.

• Don’t bury pages too deeply in the site. Generally speaking, if a page is more than three clicks from the homepage the likelihood of being indexed goes down dramatically.
• Don’t use frames. These are largely out of vogue by now anyway, but occasionally you’ll run into them. Frames load two different pages simultaneously and are a search engine (and usability) nightmare.
• Avoid urls with variables. Many content management systems will create urls based on a string of parameters - if you’ve ever seen a url like www.site.com/content?id=398k&comment=18 then you know what this looks like. Search engines are not fans of urls constructed in this manner, and modern systems make it easy to avoid it. The best alternative is to use “pretty urls” which read much more naturally for humans and search engines. Urls like www.site.com/content/my-new-page follow this convention.
• Every page should be reachable via a simple HTML link. This has numerous implications. If your navigation is flash only, if it’s dynamically loaded in some way, is hidden behind a login, or is only available via a search function on your site there’s a good chance it can’t be found by a search engine.
• Always create a sitemap. A sitemap is basically a page listing all the content available on your site. It is often accessible via a link in the footer of every page, and makes it easy for search engines (and your users) to reach every page on the site. This is recommended in all cases, but particularly if you a site with pages buried deeply.

Making these changes give you a top ranking by themselves, but they will at least prevent you from being disqualified before the race even starts. Again, this list is by no means complete. If you have any additional suggestions that we missed feel free to leave a note below!