Internet Building Codes Blog

It used to be that the home page was really the hub of your site because most routes through your site ended in a dead end so you’d have to hit the back button to go back and navigate to the page you wanted from the home page.  These days, the Internet has grown up and most savvy web developers understand that navigation is key when getting people to stay on your site.   Poor navigation can result in people leaving your site immediately.  But did you know that poor navigation can also keep people from ever visiting your site in the first place?

It’s true.  If you have designed your site so that it’s not search engine-friendly it’s likely that people will never even find your site in the first place.   Google loves clean navigation.  If your site is a mess of confusing links that spider through out the whole site, they are likely to give up and leave your site without even reading through all of the pages.  Furthermore, if your code used to generate those fancy cascading drop down menus is combersome, Google may get annoyed and leave right away.  They really dislike poorly written code.  They dislike verbose, bloated code.  That’s why Google tends to reward sites that use CSS.  CSS is clean.  CSS is concise.  Google can read a CSS site and know immediately what it’s all about because the content isn’t buried somewhere in thousands of lines of code.

But, if you must use some fancy, bloated javascript, do one of two things to help minimize the negative effects on Google.  Either put the javascript in an external file and reference the script in your page, thus saving tons of extra lines of code, or put the script at the bottom of your code.  Google reads through your code from top to bottom.  If they read your site and find all of the content first, then when they encounter your nasty code, they’ll have already gotten what they need to get in order to list your site in their results pages.

Hope that helps.

Chadd Bryant

Internet Building Codes, Founder and CEO

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

We touched on external links yesterday, but this one is so important that it’s worth mentioning again today.  For those of you who missed the post yesterday, we were talking about internal links and how you need to choose your anchor text wisely.  What’s that mean?  Well, anchor text is the blue, underlined text that you click  on.  You know, the hyperlink itself.   If you choose to make the words “click here” be your link, you’re wasting one of your big cards in terms of SEO.  Instead, you should choose a phrase that’s important to your SEO strategy.  If you want your page to be found for the term “external links” then you should choose to link to that page with hyperlinks that say “external links.”  That increases the value of the receiving page that’s about external links in Google’s mind.  If you always choose to link to your pages with poor anchor text, like “click here” or “check it out” then you’ll help that receiving page to rank better for those lame phrases.

Now here’s the trick to external links, if you’re wanting to help the sites that you’re linking to, then choose your anchor text wisely.  If you’re not wanting to help promote the site you’re linking to, then choose any text you want.  But, remember this, any time you create a link out of your site, you’ve essentially made a leak in your site where visitors can leave.  But that’s not only bad for your traffic, it’s seen as a bad thing by Google.  Google sees your link to another site as a vote for that site.  But it’s a zero sum game.  If you give a link to that other site, you essentially harm yourself in the process.  Google removes some of your sites value when they see links out of your site.  It’s a very complicated algorithm that calculates the amount of things you’ve done right and things you’ve done wrong in Google’s eyes.  When they’re all done calculating your page’s value, you get what’s called a Google PageRank.

Don’t be confused by the name though.  Here’s a little known fact.  The term PageRank, isn’t intended to be a rank of your page, instead it’s named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page.

To avoid having your page’s PageRank decrease because you link to another site, you can use the NoFollow tag.  When ever you create a link to another site, it’s a good idea to use the NoFollow tag because it tells Google to ignore the link when calculating their Google PageRank.  Essentially, you’re able to provide a link to any site you want, without giving up your own site’s PageRank.  The link still works when people click on it so be careful because you’ll still offer a place where people can leave your site.

Chadd Bryant

Keyword mapping.  Some people call it internal links.  Others call it inside links.  Whatever the term you choose, the practice is becoming more and more popular in the SEO world.

Everywhere you turn, SEO professionals are buzzing about it these days.  It used to be that keyword mapping was just a way to get your visitors from one page to the next.  But, as Google placed increasing weight on the anchor text variable in their algorithm, linking structures took on an additional role.  It’s assumed that when you click on a link in a site, if it says “keyword mapping” you’re going to wind up on a page that’s all about keyword mapping.  The blue, underlined hyperlink text or anchor text, is a determining factor that contributes to the landing pages overall SEO health.

Look at it this way…If you have a site that has 100 pages, and you have one page that’s all about keyword mapping, or internal linking if you prefer, you can essentially help that page to rank better in Google’s search results by just mentioning keyword mapping on some of your other pages within your site.  Then link from that reference to the keyword mapping page and you have just helped that page to rank better when people are searching for keyword mapping.

This post is supposed to be just about navigation and internal links, but for those of you who have just had the light bulb come on when I described the value of proper anchor text, you can utilize the same methodology when getting other sites to link to your site.  Rather than asking to trade links with a link that says “click here,” you can actually benefit yourself by getting the other site to link to your with the phrase “keyword mapping.”  Using that phrase increases the liklihood of your site being ranked well for the term “keyword mapping” rather than just ranked better for the phrase “click here.”  Who would want to rank at the top of the search engines for the phrase “click here?”  Well, actually Adobe has that distinction.   But, they didn’t do anything to get ranked well for that phrase.  They just naturally had millions of web masters link to their site with that phrase so that users could download the free Adobe Acrobat player.  That just underscores the importance of choosing the right words to use as you create links inside your site and out.  If you choose words poorly, your site may rank well for unimportant terms while your competition ranks well for your most desired phrases.

Chadd Bryant

Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it easily accessible for everyone.  If your site aids them in that goal, they will reward you.  But if your site is disorganized and the files are stored in a confusing fashion, then you may even find that your site is found lower in their results.

Think of it this way, if you have a filing cabinet and each of the folders in the cabinet are nicely labeled and are all in alphabetical order, even someone who’s never opened the cabinet before can easily find what they need.  On the other hand, if you turned the filing cabinet upside down, dumped it out and stuffed it back in, it could take months to locate the right file.  Websites are the same way.  If your site isn’t layed out in a way that makes it easy for not only visitors to find information, but also for Google to categorize it, both visitors and Google are likly to leave.

So, before you ever begin thinking about creating the first page on your site, you need to draw a site map on paper.  Sketch it out.  Use a flow chart or just a bulleted outline.  It doesn’t matter as long as you’re pre-planning the organization of your files.  But be careful…

Google doesn’t like digging too deep into your virtual filing cabinet.  It’s called deep crawling.  Think of their computers that read through your site as being lazy.  If they have to open a folder within another folder within another folder, they’ll just leave.  Forget about having those deeply-buried pages ever be found.  So, to encourage Google to read all of the pages on your site, another technique that savvy web masters are using is a logical method of file naming.  They are avoiding the over use of folders and are just naming files something like article_new_seo_technique.html.  That way all of the articles will be found grouped together in the list alphabetically but they are not buried within a folder called “articles.”

Chadd Bryant

Like I’ve said in the past, most every SEO tip, when taken all by itself is relatively simple.  It’s a cumulative effect.  Make sure you do every little thing right and you’re likely to wind up at the top.  But if you violate Google’s guidelines, you may wind up at the bottom of the listings.

Today’s post is just another, “seems too obvious to even mention” but there are so many people that violate this principle, it’s worth stating.

Don’t have any broken links in your site.  Obviously, no one would intentionally do this, but it can’t be over looked.  Use a simple tool like deadlinks.com to make sure that your site contains no broken links.