A question that is often asked is if your website is "Search engine friendly," this refers to two different elements of a website. The first being the web design and the second is the effectiveness of search engine optimization. Let us look at what makes a website search engine friendly.
A search engine friendly site is a well-built web design, the design features of the website must be done in such a way that search engines. In simple terms, this means a site that is formatted to be indexed easily and effectively be search engines.
There are many aspects of web design that will hinder the ability to be indexed properly; a common misconception is in order to achieve a search engine friendly web design the site must be all text and links. This is simply not the case; website can use JavaScript, images, and flash and still be considered friendly to the search engines.
While you can use these in the web design and while working on your search engine optimization, you have to use them in moderation. Search engines still love quality content, and they can only read text, they do not "see" what the human users see, therefore, you must use them in moderation.
When designing a website you must the web designer must ask themselves a simple, but sometimes complex question and that is "Can search engines effectively crawl this website?" this is the golden rule to making a website search engine friendly. Once a search engine finds your site, they have to be able to quickly and easily read all the pages, front page and all the inner pages. If the web design does not permit, the search engine to see all the pages that are in the site then the search engine ill simply give up and go tot the next one.
Sitemaps help to eliminate the search engines running into a rock block, therefore leaving the site. A good sitemap is just what it sounds like, a road map to all the content pages of a website. Be sure that there is a link to the sitemap on all the pages within the site, even on the "404 error page"; this will ensure a way out from any page for the search engine to follow.