Why you need Search Engine Optimization

But Search Engines are not people. They can’t read images, can’t view multimedia, and can’t deal with JavaScript or applets in any form at all. So if the spiders, crawlers and bots sent out by the Search Engines to index your site are unable to get at the relevant information then your site isn’t going to appear very prominently in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERP’s).

That’s why part of the Search Engine Optimization Report deals specifically with what you can do with your Website code to enhance the ability of the spiders etc. to ‘read’ your Website correctly. The Report will deal with your actual Website, giving actual solutions to problems that actually exist within your code. In the meantime here are a few common problems and their solutions.

Search Engines cannot understand image and movie files, they can’t interpret audio files. The solution is simple, use the ‘alt’ and ‘longdesc’ attributes to provide a text equivalent for every non-textual element on your page.

A lot of sites use graphic buttons or image maps to provide navigation on their site. Search Engines have problems with image maps. If you use an image map rather than a text based menu as the primary navigational method on your site add a redundant text menu somewhere else on the page, say in the footer, to give search engines additional information about the content of each target page. Text links are very important to search engines since the anchor text within the link often provides succinct descriptions of the content of the target page. Anchor text may well be the single most important factor in modern search algorithms.

Make sure your page is usable even if all scripts, applets or other programmed objects are turned off. Many users choose to disable such elements by choice and you would still be providing them with information. More than that, spiders can’t read scripts and if your site is reliant on them then the chances are your page will not be indexed at all.

A last point is to use clear and simple language appropriate for your site’s content.

Check out Googles’s Webmaster Guidelines http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html for further information.

“ Design and Content Guidelines:

Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.

Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.

Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.

Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.

Make sure that your title and alt tags are descriptive and accurate. [...]

Technical Guidelines:

Use a text browser such as Lynx to examine your site, because most search engine spiders see your site much as Lynx would. If fancy features such as JavaScript, cookies, session IDs, frames, DHTML, or Flash keep you from seeing all of your site in a text browser, then search engine spiders may have trouble crawling your site. ”