Search Engines Don’t See Like You or I
One thing that a lot of people probably don’t realise is, that search engines don’t see a website the same as you or I. They don’t see any images, they don’t see colour, so they don’t judge your website on how good it looks. They see a text version of you site with all the prettiness stripped out of it. So you need to consider this when designing your website. No one’s going to be able to find your pretty website if search engine bots can’t read it.
Some important points:
Use text as much as possible
Avoid using images as buttons or headings. If you want cool looking buttons and headings, I suggest you learn CSS. It can do some pretty amazing things in the way of formatting and styling text (and search engines can still read it).
Avoid “flash sites”
A flash websites is one which is based entirely around a flash application. You can pick them by their unnecessarily elaborate transition effects and long load times. There are many other problems with flash sites (if they are designed badly, which they frequently are). In case you can’t tell, I really don’t like flash sites.
Apparently, Google bots are now able to read text within flash files. But remember Google isn’t the only search engine on the Internet.
Always use ALT tags on images
ALT tags are important for a few reasons. Like I said, search engines only read text on your page. So you need to describe your images to those poor blind bots (using ALT tags). Search engines will also take missing ALT tags into account when calculating the quality of your site. And then you have image searches. Image searches use a combination of the ALT tag and text surrounding the image to determine what the image is. Having some of you photos appear in Google image search could be a good way to get some visitors to your site. So make sure images on your site are accurately described.
Of course, if you want, you can tell search engine bots not access to certain files or folders. Do a Google search for “robots.txt” for more information.
What to be able to see like a search engine?
DomainTools has a great tool for this. Type you domain name in the box and hit “Lookup”.
The next page shows heaps of useful information, including your title and description relevancy, DomainTools’ SEO score, ranks and whois information.
If you scroll down just a touch and look on the right-hand side, you’ll see the SEO Text Browser. Click it and have a play. It will even tell you what you need to fix to get a better score.
Note that there is no such thing as an SEO score. All search engines use a different algorithm to rank websites in their database. DomainTools uses its own algorithm again, to determine SEO score. I’ve found it a very useful tool for tweaking my websites, but be aware that a good SEO score won’t necessarily get you a better search engine rank.
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