Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:26:12 by Pete Handley
Hi Blogosphere.... Welcome back to my construction guide to creating SEO friendly websites.
If you haven't been reading my other entries, or just need to catch up, try checking out my previous posts, part 1 about DOCTYPES and the <head>, part 2 DIV's and CSS, part 3 Navigation, part 4 Titles and Headings and part 5 Link Anchor Text and Breadcrumb trails.
In part 6, we are looking at tidying up some outstanding areas that have not already been covered, in Sitemaps and 404 Error Pages, essential pages for a well optimised website.
A sitemap page should be created, and wherever possible this should contain links to all the pages that you want indexed on your website. If you have a website that has far too many pages to all be linked from one page, create a series of sitemaps, and have a sitemap for the sitemaps.
The sitemap should always be linked from the home page of a site, so that it is only ever one link for a search engine spider to follow to get to the list of pages that should be indexed. The simpler it is for a search engine to find all the pages on a site the better.
Also the text used in these links and surrounding description is very important at defining what should be found on these pages, and should be targeted and unique to each particular link to a page.
A custom error 404 page is also important, as if a visitor to your site navigates to a page that is no longer on the site, you don't want to scare them off with the ugly page not found message.
If you create a customised version of this based on your normal site template, the chances are you will retain that visitor rather than losing them back into the search engine ether. Its also a good idea to include your websites sitemap, as they can then navigate to the page that is closest to the one that they were looking for, and if your site has a search feature, make sure that this appears prominently so that the user can look for what they had oringinally thought they would find.
There is a plethora of information available on the internet about how to create these error pages, which if your determined enough, I'm sure you will be able to find.
Thats it for todays advice, I'm not 100% certain what I will be writing about in the next section of the SEO website construction guide, but as soon as I have decided, you guys will be the first to see it.
Pete Handley
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