How To Search Engine Operate:4

Search engines are limited in how they crawl the web and interpret content to retrieve and display in the results. In this section of the guide, we’ll focus on the specific technical aspects of building (or modifying) web pages so they’re optimally structured for search engines and human visitors. This is an excellent part of the guide to share with your programmers, information architects, and designers, so that all parties involved in a site’s construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.

 

In order to be listed in the search engines, your content – the material available to visitors of your site – must be in HTML text format. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content is virtually invisible to search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place it in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:

	Images in gif, jpg, or png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing search engines a text description of the visual content. Images can also be shown to visitors as replacement for text by using CSS styles.

	Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be repeated in text on the page. Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.

Now let’s double-check some stuff

Most sites do not have significant problems with indexable content, but double-checking is worthwhile. By using tools like Google’s cache, SEO-browser.com, the mozBar or Yellowpipe you can see what elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines.

 

Whoa! That’s what we look like?

Using the Google cache feature, we’re able to see that to a search engine, JugglingPandas.com’s homepage is simply a link to another page. This is bad because it makes it difficult to interpret relevancy.

That’s alot of monkeys, and just headline text?

Hey, where did the fun go?

Uh oh… Via Google cache, we can see that the page is a barren wasteland. There’s not even text telling us that the page contains the Axe Battling Monkeys. The site is entirely built in Flash, but sadly, this means that search engines cannot index any of the text content, or even the links to the individual games.

If you’re curious about exactly what terms and phrases search engine can see on a webpage, We have a nifty tool called “Term Extractor” that will display words & phrases ordered by frequency. However, it’s wise to not only check for text content but to also use a tool like SEO Browser to double-check that the pages you’re building are visible to the engines. It’s very hard to rank if you don’t even appear in the search engine keyword databases.