SEO: Things You Need to Know
People spend so much time trying to gear their sites up to attract customers that they forget about what’s important to search spiders. They may have cool flash, awesome graphics or code that just tagged along from their free WYSIWYG HTML editor and they don’t even know about it. Did you know that these things can be daunting to search spiders?
Yep. Here are a few things you should know:
- Never use an iframe as your entire page.
Spiders ignore iframes because an iframe’s purpose is to pull in content from other websites or other pages on your own. Whatever is in the iframe appears blank to spiders. So, if your whole page is an iframe, it’s like you have no content at all! Not good. It’s OK to use an iframe, if you must, but make it only a part of the page, and use solid SEO on-page tactics for the rest of the page, and certainly content that surrounds it.
- Don’t use flash or images as the main content for your page.
The same thing applies here. Spiders read text and code, they can’t see videos. They can’t see images, and flash… Though it might look great for visitors, it won’t help your SEO. If you’re using an image, be sure to use an ALT tag that’s keyword rich, and to surround your images or flash elements with text that means something to spiders. Titling images is another way that you can boost SEO.
- Be sure that the HTML of your page is smooth.
Broken HTML just tends to stop spiders and they go away. Validate your CSS (http://www.websitedev.de/css/validator-faq) and your HTML (http://validator.w3.org/) at W3C. It’s a breeze to do and these validators can help you to fix mistakes you may never have known existed.
- Provide a sitemap
There are tons of free sitemap generators out there that will create a sitemap of your website or blog. Blogs have plugins (Google XML Sitemaps) that do it for you, but regardless of what you use, sitemaps are always good spider food.You can create one for a website at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/
- Create a robot.txt file to stop spiders from indexing pages you don’t want included in the SERPs
If you have a private membership site, you’ll either need to add the robots META tag to every page or simply create a robots.txt that disallows spiders from your protected content. These are very easy to create, but be sure that you’re not disallowing the spiders from the whole site, and only excluding them from pages that make sense. Here’s one you can try: http://www.searchenginepromotionhelp.com/m/robots-text-creator/simple-robots-creator.php
Following just these few simple suggestions can really boost the way that spiders perceive your pages. The cool part? Visitors won’t even realize that you’re working toward spider happy, so they’ll be happy, too.
