What good is the fanciest site in the world if search engines can’t properly crawl its content? I’d rather have an average looking store with customers than an empty mall. Before you unveil your site to the world take some time to make sure it is search engine optimized. If the crawler can’t thoroughly spider your entire site, you will miss out on a substantial amount of organic search traffic.

Organization and order is very important. Make sure that your site has a good structure. If you have a large amount of pages, make sure that each page has at least one static text link pointing to it. Some find it useful to have a table of contents listing all page in a specific category/section on the default page for that category or section. You can also put a list of links to related pages from others parts of your site at the bottom of your pages to provide a better experience to your site visitors. This practice serves a dual purpose as it also provides search engine spiders more pages to crawl and index.

One more thing. Please avoid graphic links! Sure it looks cool to use fancy fonts on graphic buttons for your site navigation, but looking cool isn’t going to help you when your on page 17 in results for terms you want people to find you with.

Going further with the whole organization and order topic, it’s also a good idea to have a sitemap. What is a sitemap you might ask? Let’s take a look at what Wikipedia has to say:

“A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.”

Do your website a favor and put the creation of a site map towards the top of your website seo to-do list. Site-maps are especially important if your site uses a dynamic menu made with Flash or JavaScript. These types of menus don