Search engines may make the assumption that pages not linked to, or buried within a web site’s internal link structure, are less important, just as they assume that pages that are not linked well from external sources are less important than those that are.
Linking from the home page to content that you would like to rank can improve that page’s rankings, as well as linking to it from a sitemap and from various related content within the site.
In some cases, pages like “Terms & Condition, Help, FAQ, etc…” doesn’t go well with the main navigation links, so a good practise is to include them into the footer of you web site.
e.g. home | terms | help | faq…
Another example is when the links structure are created using flash or form select menu.
Search engines are known for not being able to read images, flash content, etc. and they can not submit forms, so creating a sitemap and adding a link to it from the home page, or adding those links at the bottom of the page, helps search engines in finding to pages included within the web site.
Talking about forms submission.
It’s a good practise to offer your visitors a search form, especially when you have an e-commerce website with 1000’s of products.
As I said above search engines can not submit forms, and so the search page is not that relevant to them, but there is a way in making it important and gain from it.
One solution I found to be very useful, is to log all searches done by users into a database or text file, and with a bit of coding you can create a large sitemap (over a period of time) that could turn your search page into a relevant source for search engines.
For instance Google Sitemaps.
With Google Sitemaps using a XML format, you can inform Google of all pages you have on your website.
XML Sitemap files can include settings for each URL as
:. their priority
:. page last modified date
Pagination, used for navigating through few pages related to a search or product category. Very useful, but can have side effects regarding search engines if not implemented right.
For example:
consider the following navigation:
home page -> page1 -> page2 -> page3 ->page4 ->page5 ->……
or
prev | next
The fifth page is harder to reach not only by users, clicking the least 5 times, but also by search engines, which can very easily treat the fifth page as less important then the first one, also called “Death by Pagination“.
Ways around it:
:. create a plain HTML sitemap with links to all the pages
:. create an XML sitemap and submit it to the search engines for crawling
:. create a better pagination like:
prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | next
