Everyone needs ’spiderability’
Search engine visibility is probably the single most important aspect for our clients’ web sites. On this blog we’ve already talked about things you can do with titles, meta data and content to make sure you can be found. However, it is also worth making sure that search engines can properly ’spider’ your site.
The key to good spiderability generally lies with two things; true hyperlinks and all pages within the site reachable within 2-3 clicks from the home page.
Hyperlinks. What are they and what are good hyperlinks?
Hyperlinks are links that you click on to surf around the web, within sites and between sites. Most links are textual or graphical but some, and these are the problem, are hidden behind so called ‘clever bits of code’; Javascript or Flash. They might look very clever to the user, and the developer who’s put them there, but they are invisible to search engines. Search engines simply sweep on past them. Why is this a problem? Web site ‘page’s ranking’ is determined by links, so you want to make sure that each and every link works well.
Three clicks to satisfaction.
I have bored for Britain about making sure users can get to any page within your site within three clicks. It’s not only users who like it. Search engines like it too. The more clicks it takes to reach a page, the less chance there is that the search engines will index that page. For really big information sites, consider a site map so that users (and search engines) can, within a single click reach any page within the site.