Over the years I have had the opportunity to run and work on many different websites, this has given me the advantage of knowing what works and what doesn’t when it comes to creating a search engine friendly website. If you have a website that you think should be showing up for particular search terms and isn’t, then read on. Even if you have been doing this for a while maybe you can learn something new from this post. I will cover some of the main points you should cover when looking to create a website or a blog that is search engine friendly.
Add text to your flash, images, and videos
To help search engines better understand what your site is about you should add text around images, flash, and / or videos. This is because search engine spiders can only understand text that is actually on the page in html, they cannot scan through the files to contained in these items to gather information about what’s on your site.
Some search engines (Google), I suppose do have the ability to scan through flash files to get a basic idea of what they are about. Even then it’s more of a basic scan to find links to other pages. So you cannot count on this as a method to let any search engine know what your site is about.
I am not trying to tell you that you shouldn’t site a photo album site, flash game site, or video site. All I am trying to say is that search engines cannot understand what is contained inside these types of file so you need to help them figure it out by including text around them. There are also a few other good method you can use to let them know what your files are about.
- If you are going to create that photo album site, or even if you are just going to include images in your site you can use the “alt” tag to let search engines better understand what your picture is about. While search engines are not able to understand what your image is about, they can read what is written in your alt text, so it’s important that you include this. In this tag you will want to write a brief description of what your image is depicting.
- Alright for the next step you should make sure that all of your websites code validates, by this I mean that your code should not contain errors within it. Weather you code by hand or use a WYSIWYG editor or you code by hand it’s always a good idea to check that your code is error free. While search engines will still crawl and index your site even it contains errors in the code, your site may not rank as well. This could be for a couple of reasons, one of them being if your HTML formatting is off it may lead the spider to believe that your text is actually part of your code. On a side note with more and more internet traffic coming from mobile devices, and netbooks, it’s becoming ever more important that your code is marked up correctly so you site will display correctly in all browsers.
- You should create unique and relevant title tags for each page. This is the tag that goes in the head of the document, while it’s not actually visible on the page itself you can see it on the top of the browser. Search engines also use these to help get an initial idea of what can be found on the web page itself, they often use this tag in the search results page as well. So you should try to make this tag as relevant and catchy as possible, so everyone can understand what can be found on your page and even entice some visitors to click on your page in the results. Some CMS’s will make it difficult to set the title tag of your pages, but the better one’s will enable you to set this tag individually making it very easy to make sure that each one is different and fit’s the page precisely.
- It’s important that your site has a menu that uses straight HTML to link your pages together. A lot of sites will use javascript for their navigation menu, while this may look great for there visitors, search engine spiders cannot read or understand what is contained inside them. This also counts for links that may be embedded inside flash files. You don’t have to ditch your current navigation system and implement a new one that consists strictly of HTML, rather just add a new one in there somewhere. You could also add a site map that will link to all the important pages of your website and provide a link to it from the main page of your website. That way both search engines and visitors that do not support javascript or flash can still find their way around your website.
- Avoiding and eliminating duplicate content on your website, there are a few different ways that you could end up with duplicate content on your website. This is especially true if you are using a CMS, that automatically create different versions of your posts. One way to avoid this is by using the canonical meta tag to let the SE spiders know which page is the original version. You could also go through your website searching for and removing duplicate content, but in some cases you may want it there to help out your visitors (printer friendly pages).
- By now every should know that you shouldn’t include hidden text on your website as search engines now frown upon this. Back in the early days of the internet and crawlers it was possible for a webmaster to include hidden text on their pages to alter the search results. However these crawlers have become much more advanced and can easily detect weather the text is visible or not, if they detect any text that may not be visible this could be disastrous for your efforts.
Alright I have a search engine friendly website how long before I can expect my site at the top of the search results? Just because you have created a website that is search engine friendly doesn’t mean it will automatically show up at the top, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, and this is just the “tip of the iceberg”. This will help you greatly in your efforts to gain top rankings in the search engine results, however this is not a one stop solution.