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Web Site Resources
Tips for Making Your Pages Search Engine Friendly:
Part 1 (handling graphics, text and the page structure)
By Donald Nelson
Your web site may look beautiful to your eyes, but what about to
the "eyes" of a search engine? If you can understand how
a search engine "sees" your site, than you can design
the site or make the necessary changes so that your site will get
a higher ranking in search results.
The first thing to consider is that search engines do not
see pictures or other graphics. If you have rendered some
very important text (loaded with keywords) as an image, a beautiful
multi-colored gif for example, the search engine will not index
these keywords. There are some wizard-oriented web creation tools
that may automatically change your text into a gif or jpg image.
It may look like text to you, but not to a search engine. Thus,
you have to weigh the relative importance of good images against
the need to give the search engine something to chew on, some "spider
food". Usually a balance has to be struck. At one extreme are
pages that contain only images. For example if you have an entry
page with a beautiful image of the ocean and a beautiful sunset
with one word saying Enter. It may be dramatic looking, but it is
not very interesting for a search engine. Similarly sites that are
only Flash images, don't give anything for the search engine's "spider"
(robotic gathering tool) to gobble up and put into the index. If
you want to use Flash, consider making a hybrid page, one that has
some elements, such as informative text, of normal HTML and a section
in Flash. Keep this in mind and make sure that your important concepts
and keywords do appear on your pages in a text format.
However as pictures and graphics are very important, there is something
that can be done to optimize them for search engine recognition.
You can put an alt tag or alternative text
on each image. The search engines will read this text and index
the words you have entered. Thus if you have your company's logo
at the top of the page Acme Widgets, you can write and alternative
text: "Acme Widgets, California's first producer of Electronic
Widgets". Put your mouse over the A1-Optimization
logo at the top of this page and you can see the alt text which
I used for this image. Search engines will see this tag and the
tag will also appear when your web visitors put their mouse on the
image. Whenever you have an image, take the opportunity to put an
alternative text tag. But remember that, although the alternative
text tag is indeed indexed by the search engines, it is not given
as much importance as other text elements.
If you really have some important text that you
want emphasized then use the heading tags, h1, h2, h3, h4
etc, and make use of bold text. These heading tags
and text rendered in bold font are given more importance by search
engines than other text because headings are thought to indicate
the main concepts of your page. The heading tags may not look as
nice as a gif image, but if they contain important keywords then
whatever you think you may lose in beauty by discarding them, will
be returned to you in better ranking positions in Internet searches
for your important keywords.
The second thing to do is to Put your important text near
the top of the page. Suppose you have put your company's
logo (Acme Widgets) at the top of the page, as a gif or jpg image.
Underneath it you might put some text reading: "California's
first producer of Electronic Widgets". If California and Electronic
Widgets are important keywords for you then you have started off
your page very well. In fact, some search engines use the first
paragraph or phrase as the description that is shown in search results.
So if the first paragraph or first phrase really says a lot and
is attractive it may entice someone to visit your page. (Getting
a top result in a search engine is one thing, but remember someone
has to think that your page is interesting enough to visit if they
are going to click on it, and the description shown by the search
engine may be the deciding factor determining whether they click
through to your page or to your competitor's page)
But, what is the top of the page? It seems obvious but search engines
do not see or rather, read pages in the same way that our eye sees
the page. Recently I built a web site for someone and then looked
at the first search engine results for that site. I saw the words
"Choose your language" as the description. (The search
engine took a phrase from the navigation bar on the left hand side
of the page, where surfers were invited to choose which language
version of the site they wanted to see). This happened because search
engines have to go through the table structure of the site. In order
to align the different elements (text and pictures) of a site, designers
often divide the page into tables. If a site is divided into two
vertical tables, one for the left hand navigation and one for the
body. The spider will first read everything in the table on the
left before going to the table on the right. I corrected this problem
by putting a pithy, keyword laden descriptive phrase in the left
hand column just above the navigation elements. So, make sure that
your important phrases are in places where the spider will see them
before they reach other less important phrases. If the table structure
on your page is not giving the right picture to the spider, then
you should make the necessary modifications to correct the problem.
Back to resources page
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has
been promoting web sites since 1995 and now runs A1-Optimization
(http://www.a1-optimization.com)
a company that provides low-cost search engine optimization and
submission services. He can be reached at support@a1-optimization.com
© Copyright 2002, Donald Nelson, all rights reserved.
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