You can compare a web page to when you look at any physical book, document or manuscript. When you read you want to be able to do so easily, the layout must be logical and you as the reader must find appeal in it. It works exactly the same with a website. The way information is displayed on web pages contributes popularity with visitors. It is also part of the deciding factor as to whether they will come back again.

Positioning of important information

Web pages must be positioned to as user-friendly as possible. Page-depth means the number of times a user will have to click to get to the page he wants. If a user must click more than twice, you should reposition that page. Page-depth is also important for the search engine spiders. The longer it takes the spiders to get to a web page through the internal linking, the more chance there is of that page not being indexed.

If your website has a large number of pages that are not being indexed, even if content is good, you need to re-organise. Look for unwanted pages that can be removed or moved to the end-line. Get your important information as close to your homepage as possible. This makes the work of the spiders easier and your site visitors will increase and stay longer.

CSS web design

If you want to make your web design the most spider-friendly and thus help your SEO efforts greatly, use cascading style sheets [CSS]. Humans look at web pages in a totally different way than how search engine spiders look at them. We can look around and pick out the most interesting content. Spiders however, look for code and text. Not using HTML for the layout and using CSS instead allows the spiders to go straight for the content rather than getting bogged down in code.

With CSS, pages of similar structure look similar, so the spiders can easily navigate and access the pages. The CSS abstract design reduces the vast amount of unwanted code that spiders see. Removing unwanted code means the content of the pages is moved closer to the beginning.

This also means that maintenance becomes a far easier task. Switching from the table-based format to cascading style sheets can reduce the volume of code by a whopping 45%. Table-based format is cumbersome and results in tables within tables to fit in data, this makes the page very complicated and consequently more difficult for search engine spiders to read.

Keep it simple

To allow your SEO efforts the best chance of success and get your website fully indexed means keeping your layout simple. Make things easy for the search engine spiders, let them do their job thoroughly. Do not place unwanted obstacles in their path. Do your SEO in all the applicable places on your web pages to get the best advantage. With simple web page design you will open the doors wide for spiders to crawl and indexed each and every page.

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