SEO - Re-coding & Restructure

Why is this important for search engine optimisation?

The purpose of any search engine is to look for text that relates to a search query. This is carried out by a group of programs, commonly and collectively known as Search Engine Spiders developed by companies such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.

The aim, for SEO, is to ensure that each page on your site is focused towards a particular topic that your company specializes in, so that search engine spiders can easily identify what the page is about.

Helping The Spiders

SE spiders have literally nanoseconds to visit & identify what your site pages are about. If they encounter any difficulties with mapping out information upon their visit, they simply stop looking at your site & move onto another.

If we can make it easy to find the information we want to show them, this can ensure that your site pages have the most achievable listings within the search engine indexes.

This is why Leadbank carries out certain measures for restructuring site pages, within a number of areas of the page coding, as part of the search engine optimisation process.

Search Engine Optimisation: re-coding & restructure

After initial SEO analysis at Leadbank, target key phrases for a page are identified to include in the meta-data area, in particular the Title, Description & meta-key phrases. Good SEO practice is to ensure that these areas are relevant to the rest of the text on the page, ie. only key phrases that are within the page text should appear within the meta-key phrases data, (and the number of phrases targeted on each page should be kept to a minimum, because this increases their focus & relevance as far as search engine optimisation is concerned).

Ensuring that pages can & will be indexed - In order to make it easy for search engines to find your pages it is important to include a sitemap, (an XML sitemap is preferred, since spiders look for this in particular). A robots.txt file is also something that search engine spiders look for – this tells them which areas of your site they are allowed to visit & cache. By verifying your site with Google & Yahoo, this also aids them in identifying the components of your site.

Clean site code – the less code that SE spiders have to wade through, the easier it is to find your searchable text, so it is often necessary to reduce the coding to make it cleaner & more navigable.

Body text content – this is the main area for your text content to be found, & so needs to be oriented around your target key phrases for that page, with correct layout, well written content & useful relevant headings.

Navigational links & page inter-linking – using key phrases within the text and navigational areas again allows SE spiders to visit & identify the focus of pages within your site.