Validate Your Website for Good Search Results

So, you spent a considerable amount of time designing your website. You have attractive graphics on display, user-friendly navigation, perhaps a bit of Flash or javascript to enchance the user's experience on your site. The site's content is fresh, relevant, and original. A site such as yours should attract much attention in relevant search results, so why is incoming traffic so slow? Why are the search engines not caching your information as quickly and as often as you would like?

You look at your website and wonder what could be wrong. On the outset, the site looks fine, but consider this: what the average Internet user sees is not what the search engine spider (or "bot") sees when it crawls the web to collect the data. The spider reads the site's code, all of the characters and data you or your HTML editor added to create the site. Oftentimes, a spider will attempt to crawl a site only to become entangled in a different kind of web! If there is one character out of place, additional code that shouldn't be there, or code that is unreadable to spiders, your website just may be bypassed altogether.

Remember all of those fancy Flash and javascript doo-dads you implemented? Some spiders can't read that type of code, and you may be blocking them from collecting your information for search. Be sure to allow room for spiders to move around. Keep complicated code to a minimum or forgo it altogether. The cleaner a website's code is, the better a web crawler can spider the site and gather relevant data for caching. The more relevant, updated information a seach engine spider gathers from a site, the better that site's chances are in search results.

A good way to determine whether or not your website is searchable is to have the code validated. The W3C Validator is a free service recommended to validate site code and check for conformance to W3C standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international consortium where member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public, work together to develop standards for the World Wide Web. Simply enter your URL in the validator and a list of errors, where applicable, will alert you to what needs to be improved in the code of your site. Think of it as fine tuning, it may take some time to improve your site's code, but in the long run the increase in search referrals will have made it work the hard work.

About The Author-- Kathryn Lively is an Internet specialist with CINIVA Systems, a Virginia Beach-based website design and hosting company.

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