Creating search friendly websites

Whether you create your organisation's site yourself or work with outside contractors you should aim to stick to the following guidelines;

• Relevant, easily accessible content is key to attracting and retaining your audience. Use simple language. The content of your site should be as easy to read as possible and shouldn't use 'jargonistic' terminology from the sector your organisation works in.
• If your site is created using a content management system such as Drupal you should ensure that pages can be indexed by search engines by giving them URLs (web addresses) that use a directory structure rather than URLs that contain 'query strings' or characters such as question marks which will not be indexed. So for example a URL that ends  /news/document/latest.html is more likely to show up in search results than one that ends  /news/document/?23950.html.
• Important pages should have permanent URLs.
• Avoid using Flash as search engines are unable to properly index Flash-based content
• Search engines have trouble indexing pages from sites with frames so try and avoid using frames in your site design.
• Content quality is especially important for entry pages such as the homepage, which are linked to from other sites. You should ensure that entry pages contain lots of the keywords that you wish your site to be known for.
• Community created content is very popular with search engines so consider adding content to your site such as comments, blogs and wikis which are created by site visitors.
• If you are working with an outside contractor to create your web site make sure they are prioritising search engine optimisation in their strategies.
• “Semantic mark-up” such as heading tags, tell the search engine that some pieces of content are more important than others so try and use them.

Accessibility

Making your site accessible to a broad range of users – including those with disabilities – is not only good practice  but can also improve your search engine listings and make your Web content more accessiblee to users in general.

The accessibility guidelines to follow are those created by the The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which you can read online at http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/

There are many resources available online to help improve the accessibility of your site such as
http://wave.webaim.org/ which is a free web accessibility evaluation tool.