Search Engine Optimization Demystified - Part 3

11/16/2009

Search Engine Optimization Demystified

Part 3 - Road Blocks to Search Engines

In the first part of this series?Search Engine Optimization Demystified - Part One, we examined the players in the search engine optimization game. Understanding the industry helps us to see through the hype and separate the actual workings of the search engines from the mythology popularized by those looking to make a quick buck off of SEO services.

In the second part of the series?Search Engine Optimization Demystified - Part Two, we looked at how the search engines see your web site. We went through ranking, indexing and the rules to follow to get the best results for excellent natural search engine results.

In this, the third article in this series I will explain how search engines can be prevented from ever getting to your site and how they can be restricted from parts of your web site through bad web development practices. This results in poor search engine ranking and low natural search traffic levels.

Meta Tags

There are ways that the informed webmaster can intentionally instruct search engine robots not to index a web site. There are some good reasons to do this. For example, we have a client who only serves the government on construction projects and only uses his web site as an addendum to his bids. He does not want the general public finding his site since answering calls from the public would be a nuisance.

We added this Meta tag to the code of his site:?<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
It does what it looks like it does; it instructs the search engine "robots" not to index this page or follow the links from it.

Now before you get paranoid - I have never seen this done maliciously, but if you have a robots meta tag on your site it should say:?<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX, FOLLOW">
Since search engines assume this to be the default setting, it is not really necessary to have this tag on your site.

There are also meta tags that can tell the search engines what kind of content to expect on this web site. This may reduce traffic intentionally, for instance:?< META NAME ="AUDIENCE" CONTENT="ADULT">
This tag is used by search engines to filter search results for people who set their search preferences to exclude explicit content.

You can see the META tags that have been used on your web site by looking at the source code of the site through your browser. For example, with Internet Explorer choose "Source" from the "View" menu. The meta tags will be in the top part of the file between the?<head>
tags - if you hit the?<body>
tag you've gone too far.

Frame Sets

A frame set is a set of web pages coded so that parts of your screen show content from different files. This used to be an easy way for an amateur to place a navigation bar on all of the pages of a site. Frame sets are not used by professional webmasters anymore due to the negative impact they have with search engines. Since frame sets first came out in the mid-1990's, coding has evolved to the point where webmasters can develop web sites faster and more easily without the need for frame sets.

The site's first page is the most heavily weighted web search engine. According to the weighted complete a variety of factors, including the text on the page amounts. Since the first page of a frameset is a set of code instructions on how to find and use the browser for the next page, what is the framework of the set's performance was "downgrade" in one document all of the pages of a site reduction in the level of the hierarchy of the page结构. Search engine uses page-level to determine the importance of web pages in your site. If you are not the first page of its content, so that it ranks poorly, if all secondary schools to the first page of other pages, they will be ranked lower.

A typical frame set page looks something like this in the code view:?
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>A simple frameset document</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET cols="20%, 80%">
? <FRAMESET rows="100, 200">
? ? ? <FRAME src="frame1.html">
? ? ? <FRAME src="frame2.jpg">
? </FRAMESET>
? <FRAME src="frame3.html">
</FRAMESET>
</HTML>

As you can see there is absolutely nothing in the way of actual words in the page that may be indexed by the search engines. You can understand now why utilizing a frame set would depress your search engine rankings.

In addition, the search engines should follow the hierarchical links to index the contents of the site a good setting. When you contact you, all the menus may be included in the code view frame1.html above, you are the search engines to do a positive step, find the menu. As we have already mentioned, this is actually how the frameset smashed a level of everything, making it through an extra hoop to jump to the search engines your content. Search Engine for website owners look forward to jump through additional hoops in order to appease them, we - they do not like at all times, reversing the situation, and rank your site.

Media-Rich Home Pages

Media-rich home pages contain Flash, images, video and other multimedia files as the primary content. If you only remember one thing about search engines, remember this: search engines can only read text.

Search engines can not read images or text is written in the picture. They, Flash in the movie, read the text description or narration from the video can not understand. Many of the PDF to jpeg image is encoded as a search engine can not load the saved in this format. Text-only search engines can read the HTML is included in the meta tag (this is especially for search engines) will be written to.

A common misuse of Flash is the

Some web sites are written entirely in Flash and are not accessible to search engines as is. There are a few ways around the Flash barrier, like creating an HTML version of the site with meta tags and using additional navigation links in HTML. But why place a barrier to search engines on your site in the first place? We recommend using Flash for decorative purposes. We recommend that it only be used in such a way that if it were removed, search engines would still have everything necessary to index the site correctly.

To test your site's accessibility to search engines check if you can copy and paste the text from the web browser to your text editor. If the text is written in HTML you will be able to do this. If you can't, it is likely that search engines will not be able to read this text. A site done entirely in Flash or with images is usually the result of a company web development effort driven primarily by graphic design personnel with little or no input from web development professionals. If you are developing a website for business rather than for a movie, an event, or an art exhibit, you are better off listening to the advice of web development professionals who are trained in SEO concepts for maximum ROI through better search engine placement.

Other Landing Pages

A landing page may not be media rich, but may have very little content on it in order to "direct" users to a specific location on the site. In Canada we often see landing pages directing users to click on links for either French or English versions of the site. This can be avoided by using scripts that detect the default language of the browser and direct the user to their preferred language without the need for them to click a link. Using language specific web site addresses is another good practice. Alternatively put the link to the choice of language on every page of the site in the navigation. This allows users to switch languages from any page on the site. This is important once you realize that search engines often display internal pages rather than the home page of a site on their search result pages. Well optimized web sites avoid low content landing pages.

Dynamic Content and Menus

Search engines cannot read text that is dynamically created when a visitor asks for it. A search engine will follow all of the links it can see on a web site. But a search engine will not type in search terms in a "search box" to see what other content you have in your database. If you have a database driven web site you must have "hard coded" links to the data that the search engine can follow, or much of your web site will be not be indexed.

Search engines can not read text embedded in JavaScript or another scripting language that allows the user to (do something like from a drop-down list to select the options) to get new content. Therefore, most of the drop-down type are you will see navigation bars at the top of the web pages actually impediments to the search engines. If a search engine spider sees a real link is coded, you will lose them. This is actually the most common hurdle that we watch on a site, because inexperienced web design staff of the fact that search engines can not read the script menus are not aware of.

As an aside, javascript drop down menus are usually also less human user-friendly due to the fact that they difficult to manually operate, and they provide no navigational reference point since the drop down 'snaps back up' disappearing as soon as it is clicked. While there are again various methods to "get around" this obstacle, these are stop-gap measures that can and should be avoided.

Remove the road blocks!

As we have seen, there are many web site design practices commonly in use today that put up barriers to search engines. The more experience your webmaster has in SEO the less likely they are to engage in practices that can confuse or mislead search engine spiders. But you, as a web site owner, must make it clear to the developer of your site that SEO is important to you. SEO is time consuming and requires training. Unless you request a search engine friendly web site - and pay for one - you are not likely to get one. If you have any of the above barriers in place on your site, we encourage you to give us a call today to find out how we can get you out of the search engine quagmire that you are likely in.

By Candace Carter, Back2Front - The Web Site People. December 2009

www.back2front.ca