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"Making Sure Your Site Is Crawler-friendly"
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The search engine spiders are primitive beings, and although they are constantly being improved, for best results you should always choose simplicity over complexity.
What this means is that cutting-edge designs are generally not the best way to go. Interestingly enough, your site visitors may agree. Even though we SEO geeks have cable modems and DSL, our site visitors probably don't. Slow-loading Flash sites, for example, may stop the search engine spiders right in their tracks. There's nothing of interest on the average Flash site to a search engine spider anyway, so they're certainly not going to wait for it to download!
Another source of grief towards getting your pages thoroughly crawled is the use of the exact same Title tags on every page of your site. This sometimes happens because of Webmaster laziness, but often it's done because a default Title tag is automatically pulled up through a content management system (CMS). If you have this problem it's well worth taking the time to fix it.
What about the use of JavaScript? We've often heard that JavaScript is unfriendly to the crawlers. This is partly true, and partly false. Nearly every site I look at these days uses some sort of JavaScript within the code. It's certainly not bad in and of itself. As a rule of thumb, if you're using JavaScript for mouseover effects and that sort of thing, just check to make sure that the HTML code for the links also uses the traditional "a href" tag. As long as that's there, you'll most likely be fine. For extra insurance, you can place any JavaScript links into the "noscript" tag, put text links at the bottom of your pages, and create a visible link to a sitemap page which contains links to all your other important pages. It's definitely not overkill to do *all* of those things!
There are plenty more things you can worry about where your site's crawlability is concerned, but those are the main ones I've been seeing lately. One day, I'm sure that any type of page under the sun will be crawler-friendly, but for now, we've still gotta give our little arachnid friends some help.
"Brief History of  Windows
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"4 Tips To Get Visitors To Click"
from
On many sites, it's impossible to lead visitors straight to your primary goal on the home page. Getting visitors to take your most-desired action often means you have to use your home page to channel them down a certain path. You have to guide visitors through a set of choices before they can actually complete the action you want them to take.
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Of course, the practical question is, "How do I entice visitors to choose?" Remember these 4 tips:
1. Be vigorous. Use contrasts in color and size to help attract attention to the main options. Use clear, dynamic language to describe the different choices. Don't take your vigor to extremes, however. You don't want to look like you're begging visitors to choose an option.
2. Keep it short and simple. If the focus of your main page is to get visitors to choose one option, get them to do that first. Then delve into more depth on the next pages. Important note: Long copy is not bad in itself, even on the main page. However, it's used for a different purpose.
3. Don't make it TOO short and simple. Visitors need enough information to make an informed decision. They ought to know precisely which category they fit into, so the choices should not be vague. Simply having three buttons in the middle of your home page without any explanatory copy doesn't cut it.
4. Prioritize options. Your main page may require 15+ links, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't prioritize them. If visitors see too many choices that are all ranked equally, they won't be able to evaluate them all and won't feel motivated to pursue any of them. Generally, you should have 2-4 main options that stand out in importance over all the rest.
Read the entire article HERE!
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Rich@RichsWebDesign.com
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