SEO - Link Component

One of the main components of search engine optimization is the link component. The strategy of placing keyword rich text in your web pages is ineffective if the search engine bots have no way of finding the text. The way your pages are linked to each other, and the way your website is linked to other websites, impacts significantly on your search engine positions.

 

Even though search engine bots are powerful data gathering programs, HTML coding or scripting can prevent a bot from effectively crawling your pages. Examples of site navigation schemes that can cause problems are:

 

Poor HTML coding on all navigation schemes. Browsers can display web pages with poor HTML coding, however, search engine bots are not as forgiving as browsers are.

 

JavaScript. The major search engines are not able to follow links embedded inside of JavaScript, including mouseovers, arrays and drop-down menus.

 

Dynamic or database-driven web pages. Pages that are created using scripts, databases and/or have a ?, &, $, =, +, or % in the URL can present major problems to search engine bots.

 

Flash. At present, none of the search engines can follow the links embedded in Flash documents.

 

Therefore, to make sure that search engine bots are able to record the data on your web pages, it is a good idea to have two methods of navigation on a web page: one that pleases your end users, and one that the search engine bots are able to track.