The Art of SEO, 2nd Edition

Chapter 6. Developing an SEO-Friendly Website

In this chapter, we will examine the major elements of how to assess the search engine friendliness of your site. Making your site content accessible to search engines is the first step toward creating visibility in search results. Once your website content is accessed by a search engine, it can then be considered for relevant positioning within the SERPs.

As we discussed in the introduction to Chapter 2, search engine crawlers are basically software programs. This gives them certain strengths and weaknesses. Publishers must adapt their websites to make the job of these software programs easier—in essence, leverage their strengths and make their weaknesses irrelevant. If you can do this, you will have taken a major step forward toward success with SEO.

Developing an SEO-friendly site architecture requires a significant amount of thought, planning, and communication, due to the large number of factors that influence the ways a search engine sees your site and the large number of ways in which a website can be put together. There are hundreds (if not thousands) of tools that web developers can use to build a website, many of which were not initially designed with SEO, or search engine crawlers, in mind.