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Unfriendly Text Formats
Last month I wrote some posts on how to make sure your web pages are search engine spider-friendly. Today I’ll be focusing on how to make sure that the visible text on your web pages are “spider-friendly”. To start off here are some text styles that are definitely NOT not recognizable to search engines.
1. Text in images (jpeg, gif, etc)
2. Text embedded in Flash and Java apps
3. Text that can only be accessed thru on-page actions like submitting a form.
Since text presented in the above formats cannot be indexed by search engines the first rule in making sure that your text is search engine spider-friendly is to avoid putting them in the above format. Of course there are instances when you need to make use of images and Flash and or Java applications. For businesses it is also very common to make use of on-page actions for transactions. The point though is to minimise the use of these and during times that you do make sure that you use ALT tags to indicate what the images contain (this is an altogether different topic and won’t be tackled in depth at this time). Of course if the entire page is mostly composed of text presented this way just make sure you make use of the proper keywords in key placements (Title Tag, URL, Header Tag, and Link) and wherever else you can add the keywords, whether visible to visitors or not. Just make sure you don’t resort to cloaking and that you only insert keywords for legitimate purposes!
Next up… A discussion on how to optimize the visible text in your website.
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