Ya know… there's a reason search engine optimization has become such a big part of the internet and marketing worlds.  For most internet users, the search engines are the keys to everything online, including your company.  Without a successful SEO strategy, your company is likely to rank poorly in the search engine results, if it ranks at all.  Despite these facts, some companies still don't pay much attention to how search engines see their webpages.

Lisa Barone was able to attend a panel on successful site architecture and reported back on the discussion over at Bruceclay.com.  The panel featured talks by internet marketing specialist Barbara Coll, SEO expert Derrick Wheeler, and "accessibility king" Matt Bailey and focused on ways to open websites up to better indexing by search engine crawlers.

Barone makes a good point:  if your website is an important part of your company's future, why would optimization efforts not be a top priority during the initial creation of a website?  Unfortunately, SEO is usually something companies look at long after their website has been created.  Derrick Wheeler gave the audience several excellent techniques for starting an optimization effort on an existing website:

• Uncover all of your site’s domains and subdomains.
• Identify the number of unique Web pages on each domain or subdomain.
• Measure the number of pages from your site that are indexed at each engine.
• Identify sections or pages of your site not indexed.
• Track your rankings for business critical keywords at major search engines.
• Measure how much traffic you are getting from each engine.
• Review the search phrases that are generating traffic from each.
• Determine which phrases generate the most conversion.

Wheeler also discussed best practices with the group, including text navigation and site design tips, and HTML status codes.  Part of his discussion on best practices apparently involved a discussion of worst practices to avoid.  Barone refers to these worst practices as "spider traps" while Wheeler called them "The Circle of Death".  All of the design elements included in the "spider traps" and "Circle of Death" involve hampering or preventing search engine crawlers from gaining access to your site.  Things such as forcing the crawlers to accept cookies (which most won't), tracking IDs or dynamic URLs, and home page redirects are mentioned in Barone's story.

Matt Bailey took his turn and discussed ways to make websites accessible to everyone and what to avoid when designing your site.  Some of his examples of things to avoid included image-based websites, websites that require some sort of user action to enter, and missing alternative text.  In addition, he offered several design tips to make accessibility easy:  clear hierarchies, site maps (which are different than sitemaps), text instead of images and JavaScript, accurate titles and alternative text, and easy to understand URLs.

This was an excellent article and had a ton of great information in it.  I wish I'd have been able to attend the panel discussion in person.  The techniques and best/worst practices outlined in Barone's article cannot be stressed enough.  They are the foundation of any successful SEO operation and can make or break a website's successfulness.

You wouldn't wear glasses with crystal lenses, would you?  Sure… they'd look nice.  But they wouldn't be optimized for your eyes and you wouldn't be able to see anything, right?

Don't put crystal glasses on your website.  Besides… search engine crawlers don't care about looks at all.