The bottom line is that there are good and bad ways to actually build a website, irrespective of how it actually looks to the human eye. Two sites could, in theory, look nearly identical as far as humans are concerned, but one may be built in what I call a “search engine friendly” way (highly visible to a search engine), and the other may be built in an inappropriate way which, to a search engine, looks completely invisible.
To understand this a little more, we need to think about how a search engine works. A search engine is, effectively, a very large database. A database query will only get a result if the thing being queried exists somewhere in the database. So if your site sells green widgets, and you expect someone to be searching for 'green widgets' on the database (search engine) then clearly your page needs to mention 'green widgets' prominently (and in the right way; but we'll come onto the method later). That is not so daft as it may sound. So many times have I seen sites which look fantastic but completely miss this critically important, yet simple, necessity. Some, for instance, may use flowery sales language on their home page, for instance talking up the company's history, pedigree, turnover, number of employees in 20 countries and so on.... but not mention the fact that their business is involved mainly in selling green widgets (or whatever) until several pages into the site. Other times a company may actually prominently show a graphic reading, "Green Widgets For Sale" right there on the home page ... but do it as part of a graphic (not real text), for instance a heading photo-montaged onto a photograph. Search engines, like databases, can't read pictures. Search engines thrive ONLY on 'real' text. So the graphic which reads (to humans), "Green Widgets For Sale" is completely invisible to a search engine. As an aside, I should add that there are small things which can be done to 'graphical text' which will help overcome the invisibility a little bit - but only a little bit - (I refer to what's known as "ALT" tags which are the little text messages which sometimes pop up when you hover over some photos or other graphics within a website - e.g. if using a browser like Internet Explorer). However, the ideal would be for the green widget heading to be "proper" text in the first place because an "ALT" tag is not enough on its own.
Another common mistake website designers make is to use what's known as 'frames'. You can tell when a page has been built with frames if you reduce the size of the browser window (e.g. Internet Explorer) and then look for 'extra' scroll bars within the general layout. These are a dead giveaway normally for the use of frames. What frames actually do is 'embed' one or more 'sub' web pages within one 'main' web page outer. So in effect you have several web pages patchworked together to look like one (to humans). What happens normally in Google with framed sites is that it sees the outer (devoid of text) holding frame but not the inner pages which contain the actual content and text. So there is nothing for it to add to its database (or 'index' as it's known).
A useful test to see how visible your site is to Google would be to go to Google and enter www.your-site.com into the search box (obviously replace “your-site.com” with your own site address) and hit enter on your keyboard. When the result appears (assuming your site is in Google's index) don't click on the main link, instead click on the word 'cached' underneath. Then, in the window that appears next, you'll see Google's blurb in a box at the top. The third hyperlink down in that box will say "Click here for CACHED TEXT only". Click that and then you'll see how much text Google has found in your page (and added to its index). Bearing in mind that graphics are irrelevant to search engines, you should be looking for lots of text appearing, preferably with your page's main keyword (product or service) somewhere close to the top. Going back to the previous paragraph about frames, or sites relying purely on graphics, those type of sites would show up zero (or close to zero) cached text in the Google page I've just described. What this means is that, effectively, those site are invisible to a search engine because there is no data (text) to add to the search engine's database.
That's probably enough for Part 1 of this "Basics of Search Engine Optimization" tutorial. I'll develop this further in Part 2 very soon.
Basics of Search Engine Optimization (part 1) - To learn more about this author, visit Mark FitzGibbon's Website.
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