The Importance of Making Websites Visible to Search Engines

Making a website appeal to visitors should not be a web architect’s only concern. The website should also be visible to search engine spiders. This is especially true for business websites. If a website is search engine friendly, it will have better exposure to search engines, giving the site a higher placement on the search engine’s search results page. A search-engine friendly website can also help to keep it
away from being penalized or banned by just following the quality guidelines required by search engines.

There are several ways to make a website more search-engine friendly. One is through validation of HTML and CSS codes. Websites need to have their HTML and CSS codes validated in order to promote search engine visibility.

Validation of codes eliminates the possibility of having errors on websites, and while search engines do not need website to be free from errors, they do depend on the precision of the codes in order to determine which portions of the website should be indexed. Unseen errors in coding can confuse search engine software, thus compromising the website’s chances of being crawled or given higher page ranking.

Another important component in website planning that any website should have is proper navigation and link structure. Having easy to understand navigation of links contributes the website’s goal of being visible to search engines. Ideally, all inner pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. This makes the information in these links easily visible to search engines.


It also helps to add a sitemap, or a graphical representation of the website’s architecture, so that visitors and search engine spiders can easily access the inner pages of the website. This helps search engine spiders locate documents faster and speed up the indexing process significantly. It is important to make sure that there are no broken links on the page especially during the web prototyping stages in order to ensure search engine visibility.

During the website planning phase, title tags are added in the non-visible text in the HTML coding displayed in the browser or title bar. These tags should be relevant to the information stored on the website’s pages because these tags are the immediately seen by search engine spiders and used as part of the algorithm that determines the site’s relevance to a particular search string.