Internet Building Codes Blog

I have to start by apologizing. It seems like the past couple weeks have flown by in a flurry of egg nog and pumpkin pie.  The two-week break in San Francisco was wonderful.  The whole Bay Area is beautiful.  I love it out there.  Anyway, I’m sorry for not blogging for the past couple weeks but with the exception of a business meeting in San Jose, I was able to completely relax.  It’s not often that you get to totally escape from the chaos of business.

So let’s get back into things.  When I last blogged, I was talking about creating Google XML site maps.  This time, we’re going to discuss text based navigation and why it’s so important.

If you’ve been developing sites for any length of time, you know that all navigation was text based hyperlinks when the Internet first began.  Then as time went by, javascripts gradually began to come onto the scene and developers saw the potential to use cascading drop down menus, jump menus and other clever forms of navigation to enhance the user’s experience.  Then Flash really started to catch on.  Menus could do just about anything.  They could look any way you wanted them to look.  They could play sounds and they could be animated.  However, they couldn’t be read by search engines.  Google couldn’t follow the links so Google didn’t know that any of the pages beyond the home page even existed.

Eventually, Google began reading javascript menus and Flash navigation, but with disdain.  While they’d read through the pages and follow the links, they’d only read some of them and they’d likely ignore the majority of the links.  So developers began adding secondary navigation using simple hyperlinks at the bottom of the page so that search engines could more easily find all of the pages within a site.  Today, many sites still use a simple hyperlink navigational system at the bottom of the page despite the fact that they have moved away from javascript and Flash-based navigation.

As CSS or cascading style sheets have become more and more popular over the past several years, both users and search engines like what they are seeing.  Not only are the CSS menus easy for the search engines to read, they offer clean code that encourage Google to read more pages than before and they help your site to rank higher in the Google search results pages.  Users are enjoying menus that are compatible to most browsers without the need to download the latest Flash plugin while having the ease of Javascript cascading menus.  CSS offers power, simplicity and results. If you insist on using Flash or javascript menus, don’t forget to include the simple hyperlink navigation at the bottom of your pages just to help with search engines spiders.

Chadd Bryant

One of the fastest ways to get your site spidered by Google is to add an XML sitemap.  If you know ho to write your own XML sitemap, great.  You’re ready to go.  Just register with Google and tell them that you’re ready to have them read it.

If you’re like most people, you’ll want to have another website generate the site map for you so you don’t have to write the code yourself.  There are a number of sites that can build the site map for you so just Google the term, “XML Sitemap” and you’ll be on your way.  Or you can find one right on Google’s site found here:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html

As long as you there, browse through all of the Google Webmaster tools and find all of the great ways that Google can help you to actually improve your site’s visibility.  Google will explain the simple process of submitting your site map for review.  I’d go into the details of how to do it, but Google does a fine job of explaining the process. It’s not hard.  Just go do it!

Chadd Bryant

In addition to yesterday’s blog post, I just realized that I didn’t mention that you should have a couple external links in your site.  According to my buddies over at Bruce Clay, Google likes to see sites that demonstrate a willingness to share other quality sites with their visitors.  Essentially, they like it when you link to sites that are leaders in your field.  Even a link to wikipedia is a good link to consider putting on your site.  But don’t over do it.  Keep is to 3 or fewer links.

Chadd Bryant

People often want to incorporate a page of links on their site but it’s never really made much sense to me.  A link out of your site is just like a leak in a pipe where your visitors are allowed to leak out of your site.  Not to mention that links out of your site are proven to lower your Google PageRank.  Google sees the links out of your site as a vote for the other site and takes a small part of your page’s PageRank and essentially gives it to the receiving page.  The receiving page sees a boost and your site sees a drop in PageRank and a corresponding drop in overall ranking in Google’s SERPS.

If you find a site that has a page with hundreds of links to other sites, notice the PageRank in your Google Tool Bar.  Invariably, pages like that have a PR 0.  They can’t bleed off any more rank so they go to zero.

Furthermore, Google sees sites that have tons of links as worthless because they have no value in their site other than links to external sources.  If the site had valuable content, then they wouldn’t need to link to other sites, would they?  If you must create a page of links, NEVER exceed 100 links per page.  Create multiple pages if you have to.  And consider using the nofollow command to tell Google to not bleed off your PageRank.

Chadd Bryant