[thelist] doorway pages

Liam Delahunty ldelahunty at britstream.com
Mon Sep 16 05:25:01 CDT 2002


neal wrote:
>They are not going to make any changes in the design
>Yet they are having problems with search engines
>registering their pages obviously
>anybody have any suggestions on having there pages
>rated higher in search engines

Obviously make judicious use of nofames. Don't say this site uses frames,
that just looks stupid when it turns up in the search engines. (Not that I
haven't done it myself...)

The noframes should essentially be an "old fashioned" web page, text only
page with links to the sites main areas.

On normal pages - the frame contents - have a mini navigation home, about
us, contact on every page that way people can still find their way about
when a search engine indexes a page within the site. This includes search
engines that find your site from a deep link on another.

Try to have some sort of branding on the top of every page with a link to
home, and possibly a breadcrumb to the sections above it. Even if the site
is several thousand pages with a nice little global search and replace this
can be done easily on each sub-folder.

Talking of which, if the site uses sub-folders then make sure each has an
appropriate and informative index page.

Obviously use META tags,
<meta name="keywords" content="">
<meta name="Description" content="">
though I believe that these aren't as important as they once were due to
excessive meta spaming.

If possible get rid of any page bloat, such as JavaScripts, Style Sheets and
include them, the search engines that read the first x hundred characters
can then get to your data rather than a bunch of code.

Encourage links to your site. Even if they are deep links, so approach other
sites that have a similar stance/article/whatever and exchange links.

Sorry if that's all obvious stuff but it's a start.

IMO, frames aren't as 'bad' as some people make out. If you type "Covent
Garden" into Google
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&q=covent+garden
then my simple site for the Covent Garden Community Association turns up
fifth...
http://www.coventgarden.org.uk/ which seeing as we only update it once in a
blue moon at the moment is pretty good.

Kind regards,
Liam Delahunty




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