How to Ensure Your Website Can Be Read by Search Engines
Whilst we all want to create a website that creates an instant visual impact with visitors, it’s important that search engine rankings aren’t overlooked entirely. So if you create a site full of images and flash, it might look great to the human eye but it will be invisible to the search engines’ site crawlers.
Search engines aren’t human. They don’t judge a page on how nice it appears and they can’t scan through an entire site to see what information your flash files contain. They are blind to all of this.
The only content that a search engine spider can see is that which is included within the HTML coding of a page. Therefore on page copy, headers, links, Meta and tags are all visible, everything else is not.
So if you have your text contained within a flash file or image, you could be missing out on vital context for your pages. Worse still, you can lose further relevance if your links are contained within an image (with text on an image button for instance) rather than embedded in a relevant key phrase. All of this can be detrimental to your site’s SEO efforts.
If you want to have a look what the search engine spiders can actually see, Webmaster Tools is a good place to start. Google will let you ‘Fetch as Googlebot’ and Yahoo offer something similar too. This should give you an insight into what is visible and what isn’t; helping to optimise pages that may be lacking in vital content by focusing on elements that aren’t working properly or being seen.
There’s no reason why you should just take down all images and flash in an effort to optimise everything perfectly. You just need to be sensible with them. Make sure your core content is HTML coded and can therefore be seen by the search engines. Then use images to create a visual theme, not to try to contain vital information.
If you do use images, don’t forget to include relevant Alt tags. These are coded in the HTML (ergo they are visible to search engines), effectively sitting behind the image itself – appearing only when the user hovers over the picture or it hasn’t loaded properly. This is good practice anyway, helping to contextualise the page for visually impaired visitors and search engines alike.
As I have said on many occasions previously, but might as well repeat again, when it comes to contextualising your site for the search terms you’re targeting, content is essential. You have to be careful not to simply assume that a search engine will be able to comprehend your site’s purpose. Separate your content from flash and other ‘invisible’ aesthetics; both can be used, but only one will help your SEO efforts.
