Let me start off by saying the obvious… There is no point in building a website unless there are visitors coming in. A major source of traffic for most sites on the Internet is search engines like Google, Yahoo!, Bing, and so on. Hence, by designing a search engine friendly site, you will be able to rank easily in search engines and obtain more visitors.
Major search engines use programs called crawlers or robots to index websites to list on their search result pages. They follow links to a page, reads the content of the page and record it in their own database, pulling up the listing as people search for it.
If you want to make your site indexed easily, you should avoid using frames on your website. Frames will only confuse search engine robots and they might even abandon your site because of that. Moreover, frames make it difficult for users to bookmark a specific page on your site without using long, complicated scripts. If you are using WordPress, good news! WordPress does not like frames and makes it difficult to use them. Therefore, this may be a moot point for you! All together now…. Gooooo WordPress!
Do not present important information in Flash movies or in images. Search engine robots can only read text on your source code so if you present important words in Flash movies and images rather than textual form, your search engine ranking will be affected dramatically.
Use meta tags accordingly on each and every page of your site so that search engine robots know at first glance what that particular page is about and whether or not to index it. By using meta tags, you are making the search engine robot’s job easier so they will crawl and index your site more frequently.
Nicely written. I have a business website built on WordPress which I love. It’s easy to use and WordPress makes creating a professional looking website simple. Thanks for the tips!
You are welcome, Paulette! Thanks for stopping by!
Good points and ya wordpress!
w00t! 馃檪
Good tips here, Paul – especially the second one. I’m seeing a trend toward sales pages that are just a series of images. I get that it offers total control over the layout – something that can be a challenge with some WordPress themes – but the hit you take in SEO just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
It is ‘OK’ to have it, just do not expect to get any SEO value from having an image displaying a lot of text. Include the copy (text) somewhere else in the post and you should be ok.
I have a question about images. Since you can put keywords in the name of the image file and can also add alt text, an image can actually have 2 types of text that search engines can read. So I’m wondering — although I’ve written not to put text in images — if that’s completely true.
It is true, Ellen! And, you can add text to a caption and have yet another place to put it. There was some talk that Google actually reads the text IN an image (for example, if you had a picture of a stop sign, goggle would read the word STOP). Another things that Google is looking at is the EXIF data in an image. This is the metadata in an image that show where the image was taken, what camera, what lens, etc. Check out: Google Reads EXIF data From Images for more info on this!