| Page Item | Value |
| Title | Ensuring Your Site is Search Engine Friendly |
| Description | Some hints and tips for troubleshooting website search engine placement |
| Keywords | search engine, placement, optimisation, optimization, troubleshooting, problems, issues |
| Robots Meta Tag | |
| Page Content | ASP Kitchen Search: Go Home | ASP Articles | ASP.NET Articles | Tools | Table Of Contents | What's New Ensuring Your Site is Search Engine Friendly The ASPAlliance is full of useful articles about how to build your website using ASP and ASP.NET. But even though you may have the most technically brilliant website around, it's going to be of limited use if the website isn't able to be crawled by the web robots that Google and the other search engines use to find content to add to their search catalogs. This article highlights some of the (surprisingly common!) problems that affect search engine robots. The problems can be divided into two groups: Show Stoppers! Search Engine Optimisation Deficiencies (or wasted opportunities as I prefer to call them) . If you want to test your website for many issues, then an application I wrote called The Website Utility can be used. It contains a built-in web crawler which can be used to test whether web robots can successfully navigate a website. It also reveals common website search engine optimization issues . Show Stoppers! These are serious issues that will prevent a web crawling robot from indexing some or in a worst case scenario, all of a website's pages. Here are a few commonly encountered problems: Invalid HTML Web crawling robots may have difficulties navigating websites. These issues can be hard to spot, since most web browsers are tolerant of sloppy HTML. To resolve possible errors, try using an HTML validator such as the W3C's HTML validation service . You should pay particular care to ensuring that the website's internal hyperlinks are using valid HTML. For example, this is a valid link: a href= default.asp title= Home Home Page /a Whereas this link may not be recognised by a web crawling robot: a href=default.asp title=Home Home Page /a Robots.txt or Robots Meta Tag Issues Most web robots, including those used by search engines to seek out new content for inclusion in their directories will obey both a web server's robots.txt file as well as the 'robots' meta tag that may be present in individual pages. If a website, or portions of that website cannot appear to be submitted successfully to search engines it is possible that the search engine is not accepting that website due to it being marked as non-retrievable in either the robots.txt file or in individual files through the use of the 'robots' meta tag. JavaScript Navigation Web crawling robots are getting more sophisticated, but they will almost certainly have problems following links that are only accessible from JavaScript. This is common on websites that have JavaScript-based drop-down menus as their main means of site navigation. It is, therefore, a good idea to ensure that the website is fully navigable without having to rely on JavaScript. Needless to say, providing alternative means of navigation will also assist human visitors using web browsers that do not support JavaScript, or those that have disabled JavaScript in their browsers. As well as JavaScript, this issue also applies to links that are only in widgets such as Java Applets and Macromedia Flash animations. Compulsory Cookies Although it is perfectly acceptable to use cookies on a website, care should be taken to avoid compulsory cookies (i.e. the website won't work if a specific cookie isn't set). The easiest way to check this is to browse the website with cookies disabled in the web browser. Some web crawling robots are also able to support session cookies, such as those used by ASP and ASP.NET. Search Engine Optimisation Deficiencies Missing Page Titles Missing page titles is a common search engine optimisation deficiency. Since many search engines place significant weighting on a page's title, it is essential to ensure all pages have a title. Duplicated Page Titles Alongside missing page titles, duplicate page titles is another common issue. The report will show each duplicated title and which pages share the specific title. A surprising number of websites use the same page title every single page in the site, which is in most instances an obvious waste of potential site optimisation for search engines. Missing/Blank Description and Keywords Meta Tags Although most search engines now give much less weighting to the content of description and keywords meta tags than they once did, it is still a good idea to include them. In particular, the description meta tag is often used as a page's summary in search engine results pages. It is also worth including them if your website has its own search facility based on Microsoft's Index Server or The Website Utility's ASP Search Engine or JavaScript Search Engine . Insufficient Indexable Content Search engines are still mostly based on the retrieval and indexing of text content on web pages. Consequently, it is important to ensure there is plenty of text on . Although file size is often an indication of the amount of indexable text on a page, this may also indicate that the page contains a lot of non-indexable content (e.g. HTML tags and JavaScript). Testing Your Websites A good way of testing to ensure your website is search engine friendly is to crawl it using a web crawler. The Website Utility is a Windows application that can be used to test the crawlability of websites. It contains a built-in web crawler which can be used to test whether web robots can successfully navigate a website. It also reveals common website search engine optimization issues and errors such as broken links . Finally, remember that testing a website for errors and search engine optimisation issues will almost certainly result in higher levels of satisfaction from the owner - useful if your livelihood depends on happy customers and repeat business! Useful Development Tools ASP Documentation Tool Automatically creates developer documentation for ASP 2.0 and 3.0 web applications written in VBScript and JScript. Documentation for Microsoft Access, SQL Server 7/2000 databases and Visual Basic 6.0 components associated with the web application can also be incorporated into the reports. Documentation is created in HTML, HTML Help and plain text formats. View Sample Output (HTML Help format). View Sample Output (HTML Format). Download Trial Version (5.2Mb ZIP file). Index Server Companion The Index Server Companion is a Windows application that extends the functionality of Microsoft Index Server so that it is able to index content from remote websites and also from ODBC databases. As such it can be used as a low cost alternative to Site Server 3.0 Search. View Product Documentation (119K ZIP file). Try Sample Search Facility . Download Trial Version (1.7Mb ZIP file). ASP.NET Documentation Tool Automatically creates developer documentation for ASP.NET web applications written in C# or VB.NET. Documentation for SQL Server 7/2000 databases and C#/VB.NET components associated with the web application can also be incorporated into the reports. Documentation is created in HTML, HTML Help and plain text formats. View Sample Output (HTML Help format). View Sample Output (HTML Format). Download Trial Version (727K ZIP file). SQL Documentation Tool The SQL Documentation Tool creates technical documentation for Microsoft SQL Server 7.0 and 2000 databases. Technical documentation is created in HTML and HTML Help formats. The HTML Help format documentation is fully searchable and cross referenced. The SQL Documentation Tool documents SQL Server Tables, Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers and Table Relationships. View Sample Output (HTML Help format). View Sample Output (HTML Format). Download Trial Version (10.3Mb ZIP file). The Website Utility The Website Utility examines websites for errors and areas that need to be optimised for search engines by using a built in web crawling engine. Errors checked for include broken or moved hyperlinks, missing page titles and missing meta tags. It also generates HTML for use in creating website site maps (table of contents pages - like this one ), and is able to create both client-side JavaScript Search Engines and server-side ASP Search Engines for a website. View Sample Output (HTML Format). Download Trial Version (3Mb ZIP file). Text Workbench Text Workbench is a file search and replacement utility for text files and Microsoft Office documents. Make rapid file replacements on multiple files and folders full of files. Advanced replacement options include regular expressions support. It even works on remote file systems via FTP. A Regular Expression Laboratory allows advanced pattern matching and replacement expressions to be built and tested. This great utility will make your everyday development tasks much easier! Download Trial Version (3Mb ZIP file; you have the option to either install directly from this link or save the file for later installation). Author details Brett Burridge spent two years working in the University of Essex Computing Service, before moving to The Internet Applications Group in the Autumn of 1999, where he developed e-Business applications for a range of corporate clients and dot-com start ups. Brett is presently employed as an Internet developer and technical writer through his own company, Winnersh Triangle Web Solutions Limited . The company produces a number of innovative products, including the popular ASP Documentation Tool , the Index Server Companion , the ASP.NET Documentation Tool , the SQL Server Documentation Tool and The Website Utility . The company is also available for web application design and development at reasonable rates, primarily using Microsoft technologies (ASP, ASP.NET, Visual Basic, SQL Server) but also using open source technologies such as PHP, MySQL and Perl. Specialist services include development of search solutions using Microsoft's Index Server and Site Server 3.0 Search. As well as the ASPAlliance, Brett has written articles for Ariadne.ac.uk and ASPToday , and has contributed recipes to the ASP.NET Developer's Cookbook . links Outside web development, Brett is interested in digital photography (here's my photo gallery ), tropical fishkeeping and collecting contemporary works of art by artists such as Doug Hyde . Article history Ensuring Your Site is Search Engine Friendly published on ASPAlliance.com on 22 September 2004. ASP Kitchen : Classic ASP Articles : Ensuring Your Site is Search Engine Friendly
page content copyright Brett Burridge 1998 - 2004. |
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