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Validate your Website for Better SEO

by Deceth

The first step to Search Engine Optimization is making sure all the creepy crawlers can actually find their way around your website. Lets say I plan to take a trip to China to crawl (ie: visit) a certain part of the country. When I show up I’ll need directions, but unfortunately, even if I find a kind fellow happy to assist me, if he speaks to me in Mandarin, I won’t understand anything and I’ll be lost!

You can do all the optimization you like, but if you confuse poor Googlebot, he’ll turn around and go visit someone else! You need to welcome Googlebot and friends with open arms and feed them all the instructions they need to easily find all the destinations on your site. Sitemaps are great, but we’ll talk about those another day. Flash websites for example can be beautiful, but crawlers hit Flash like a bird into a freshly cleaned patio door. While they’ll stop at your site knocked out for a moment, they’ll quickly realize they can’t go forward, turn around a fly away!

Knocking out Googlebot is a bad idea if you want to increase traffic to your website. While crawlers can handle indexing poorly coded websites, the best thing you can do is validate your site “just in case”. Validating your website will help you find errors in your HTML or CSS that you likely don’t know are there and which are usually very easy fixes. Fix these up and make your site more inviting to the crawlers!

Also, definitely find broken links and fix them ASAP! Don’t upset those poor crawlers by sending them looking for pages that don’t exist! That’s just cruel don’t you think? :)


Posted in Marketing, SEO on May 1st, 2007

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