Website design and layout.

Website design effects the friendliness of your site for search engines, which in turn will effect your search engine ranking. 

Inflexible website design, overuse of advanced web technologies or a weak naviagation will all effect the ease of which search engines can index your site and therefore will have a nagative effect on your sites search eninges ranking.

Checklist

Use this checklist to see how friendly your site is for search engines.

Frames - Using frames in your website is a big disadvantage, as search engines will be unable to see content on your pages. Your site will require a redesign for it to stand a chance of being search engine friendly.

Flash - search engines are unable to index sites designed entirely using Flash. However, it is possible to have the best of both worlds by designing a website with clean search engine friendly content along with an interactive, multimedia feel. The majority of relevant text should be in HTML format for the search  engines to index.

Dynamic URLs - Dynamic URLs are considered as too complex for search engines to spider. The more complex the URL, the higher the chance that a search engine robot will consider the content to be too dynamic to read and therefore invaluable as it changes too often. It is important to keep URLs to a minimum as search engines may stop crawling a website if there appear to be too many subdirectories.

Design - the overall layout of your website and usability of your designs are important points to consider from the perspective of a search engine robot.

Site design often has different functions: branding, direct sales, customer retention, trust, communication, and online visibility. A site must be persuasive enough to sell a product or service. Product photos must communicate the product’s look and feel. The site must be trustworthy. A search-friendly site is good for customers, search engines, and site owners. 

Menus - search engines must be able to spider your menus, or they will not be able to find all the content contained within your site and therefore you will be missing out on additional search engine rankings. JavaScript and Flash cannot be indexed by search engines.

The ideal menu would be text based and each text link would include the keywords you are targeting on the destination page. Ensuring that your menu is carefully thought out and designed is crucial for good search  engine rankings.

Sitemaps - adding a sitemap to your site will dramatically aid the visibility of your website by allowing search engine spiders easy access to all the pages within your site. Obviously the site map will need a link from every page to ensure easy access from any page that a search engine may enter.

The ideal sitemap should contain a title for every webpage within your site along with a short description, so it is more a table of contents, this will have more potential of gaining a higher ranking with the search engines.

Layout - The layout of your web page can make a significant difference in how well your site ranks and therefore how search engine friendly it is.

Layout tips - as search engine robots read a web page from the top of the source code all the way to the bottom, it is essential to ensure that the following elements are found as close to the beginning of the code as possible.

• A sentence introducing the topic using focused keywords.
• Text menu using keyword links to all the other pages in your site.

Placing this information near the top of your page will add relevance to your site by presenting search engine robots with relevant text that is backed up with the page title and backlinks.

Splash pages - don't use them! The most important page of your website is your home page, this is ture for search engines and visitors alike. If you use your home page as a splash page with little or no content on it, this will have an adverse effect on your search engine rankings.

Summary

The checklist above provides a good basis for you to evaluate the friendliness of your website for search engines and make changes where necessary.