Website Navigation, Structure, Design, and Coding

I've been talking about using good coding practice for website design and listing templates for years now. Sometimes I think I must be related to Don Quixote tilting at windmills. But folks, all your SEO efforts relating to keyword density, in-bound links, and other factors you work so hard on may well be for nothing if the whole design issue isn't dealt with correctly. That's a fact. Like it or not. Badly structured, your website may not cache at all and you will simply fail to be returned in the SERPs.Time and time again I see people posting their SEO woes and stating one issue or another that they feel is the key to doing better. The work long and hard to get their site high in the SERPs and fail. They say it must be one or another of the basic search engine rules or that a particular search engine changed things and is targeting their site. Mostly this is simply wrong. I take a look at their site and I see the problem right off. It is typically a site coding issue. And don't think that just because you use an out-of-the-box pre-coded site you are immune from this. That couldn't be farther from the truth. Many of the pre-designed package cart sites, site-builder designs, and those sites made with WYSIWYG (drag-and-drop) programs like Front Page, end up being SEO disasters.Here are a few really bad no-no's:1 - your home page automatically redirects everyone who comes to your site to another page.
2 - your coding is full of errors and dozens and dozens of lines of extraneous proprietary program code.
3 - you ustilize only https// pages for your entire site, especially your home page.
4 - your home page is one large .jpg, .gif, or .png graphic image.
5 - your navigation links are 100% JavaScript or graphic image (button) based.
6 - your home page is one single Flash movie. Good, clean, HTML design for your home page and clear text links for your navigation system will allow search engine spiders orbots to easily navigate and, therefore, index your entire site. If you don't use text links for your navigation then a text-based sub-menu or site map is a must.I recently read an "expert" article with the following six key points:1 - At all costs avoid having dynamic URLs
2 - If possible use your keywords in your URL or files/directories.
4 - When designing a new site avoid having filenames like products.asp or products.php
5 - If you implement new structure create and register a Google sitemap.
6 - Link CSS and Javascript as external files.All six of these have merit but are not exactly something to lose sleep over. You could do all these things and still not find yourself well indexed. Dynamic URLs (those with variables attached like this: http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.php?ref=1&id=2) are not the bane so many seem to think they are. As long as you keep the variable list to not more than two there is no problem at all with most major search engines and, in rare cases where the number of variables exceeds two, most pages will eventually be processed anyway. If you find you need to use more than two variables regularly on most of your pages, combine the variables and write a script to parce them on the recipient page.This is six variables:http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.php?one=1&two=2&three=3&four=4&five=5&six=6But this is only one:http://www.somedomain.com/somepage.php?one_1+two_2+three_3+four_4+five_5+six_6It can easily be constructed on the originating page and then parced back to the six individual variables with a little code on the recipient page. This is one of the many powerful reasons for choosing a custom website over a pre-packaged one. It's not that pre-packaged sites are always bad. It is, rather, that they box you into a set of limits that you may want to escape from. If you do choose a pre-packaged site be sure you understand this and explore those limits before committing.Most important, probably more so than any of the six points above (though involving point six to some extent) is to have clean, minimalist, code that gets the indexable content of your site nearer the top of the page and which puts good, keyword-rich, content before menus, fluff, and filler, if possible. Proper use of heading tags, alternate text attributes, and other key coding elements are very important, of course, but good placement of content in relation to other elements like images, navigation and headings is paramount. Good use of linked Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can help maximize content to markup ratios. Since ranking has a great deal to do with content and, since search engines may only index (and cache) up to a certain amount of each page, increasing the content to markup ratio and moving relevant content toward the top of the page can only help. I've seen pages that have dozens, indeed hundreds, of lines of code that come before the first bit of indexable content. This is disastorous! No amount of fiddling with in-bound links or keyword densities will be much help when it comes to such a thing. You are lost before you start. Pre-made "cart" programs like OSCommerce and Candy Press are notoriously bad for this. Be sure you understand the impact your website choice will have on your SEO efforts. Before wasting hours and hours fiddling over suggestions provided by your well-meaning, but often incorrect, BFF you may want to speak to a professional. Good SEO can be the difference between success and failure in your online business.