Don’t Accidentally Kill Your Ranking Chances
One of the BIGGEST (and I mean BIGGEST) mistakes I see made on websites is a website owners choice (and often a website designers recommendation) of eye-candy over real “search engine readable” content. It’s not unusual for a business owner to come across a website that they think is “awesome” and “cool” and decide that they want their site to do what “that site does”.
So the business owner asks around and eventually finds a website designer (usually a friend or a friend of a friend) that can make their site “look like that awesomely cool site”. It gets done, the designer gets paid, and quicker than you can say “awesomely cool” their site rankings start a free fall in the search engines that seems to have no end in sight.
Unfortunately, this is a scenario that is repeated over and over again online multiple times a day.
Typically these “awesomely cool” sites are created in Flash or have dynamically generated scripts that run the entire website without an ounce of text to be found. While it might look great, there’s no doubt about that, the search engines have no idea what to do with it.
The bottom line is, if there isn’t text to be found, the search engines will pass you over.
This does not mean that you should nuke every last one of your images, videos, JavaScript or Flash items on your website…it just means that you need to separate the important stuff; the stuff you want the search engines to find, from the stuff that looks “neat”.
An easy way to do this is to ask yourself ”Do I want the search engines to find X?” with “X” being a web page, a description, a price, a product, etc.
If the answer is yes, and X is located within an image, within a video, Flash or JavaScript, then you need to be sure it’s also in text somewhere on your page.
Now, this is not to say that you can’t use things like images, videos, or even Flash – as a matter of fact, they do make your web page more appealing; but it should not be the sole item on the page. Even if you have details about your business for example within an image and “real” people can read it, the search engines cannot…which means that you’re web site will struggle.
Here’s some tips to follow:
- Whenever you use an image on your page, give it a description using the images <alt> attribute.
- Don’t use script to generate navigational links. Stick to basic text-based navigation and you’ll be just fine.
If you’re concerned that your site might not be friendly to the search engines, you can use a free online tool called a Lynx emulator.
Just visit http://www.yellowpipe.com/yis/tools/lynx/lynx_viewer.php and enter in the URL of the web page you want to check. Ideally you want to see keywords, lots of text, relevant topical information, etc.
You DO NOT want to see something like “This page requires the use of Flash…get the latest version at…” or something along those lines. You want to be able to look at the results of the Lynx viewer and know, without a doubt, what that web page is talking about as well as see important keywords for that page.
So the bottom line is, as “awesomely cool” that website is that you stumbled across, you can rest assured that they’re probably not getting the rankings they want in the search engines. You can keep things pretty and play it smart at the same time.