Tips for Web Authors
My site won't Google!
You've just built a really superb-looking website. It has wonderful Flash clips, glorious streaming mp3, and all the links are beautiful graphic buttons which do a Javascript-driven 3D leap when the cursor passes over them.
And you spend ages making sure you have all the right keywords in place for search engines to notice.
You upload it to the site, register it with Google and the major search engines and wait for your page to hit the top ranking. You check every day but after several months your site still doesn't show up in searches at all. And you end up tearing your hair out trying to figure out why. You even give a load of money to one of the spammers who promises to get you a high ranking, but still nothing happens. You complain to Google and Yahoo but that gets you nowhere either.
Let me try to help you.
How search engines work
First, do you know how search engines actually work?
No, I don't mean do you think you know how they work - I mean do you actually know how they work in reality?
Yes?
Good. Then you already know how to fix your problem and there's nothing more I can tell you.
No?
Have you tried to find out?
Why not?
Did you just presume that they would work in the way you thought they should work?
If you don't know how they really do work, one thing you'll have overlooked in your enthusiasm for all the bells and whistles is what search engines actually look at when they visit your website.
Spiders
What "visits" your site is a little piece of software called a "spider".
There's no gentle way to tell you this so I'll put it bluntly - spiders ignore anything which is not straight plain text. They completely ignore your style sheets, your wonderful graphics are totally invisible to them, they aren't able to watch your Flash clips and they can't hear your mp3s.
What the spider actually looks at on your website is the raw HTML document.
That's it, end of story.
Exactly the same as what you would have seen if you'd taken the trouble to switch off your graphics and Flash and Javascripts and observed what was still readable in plain text on a plain background as delivered by the basic HTML, without any styling or formatting. Or if you'd listened to it with a text-to-speech browser.
Because that is exactly and only what the spider reads.
If all the important information and links on your site are delivered via Flash or Javascript, then the important information and links will be completely invisible to a search engine spider.
The only thing - and I can't stress this strongly enough - the ONLY thing, which the spider will take note of is what is in the actual text. It will give importance to what is contained within header tags, it will take note of how many times key phrases are (validly) used. But if it's not text, the spider won't even know it's there.
If you put information in graphic format search engines will ignore it.
That's not saying that putting information in graphic format is a "bad thing"; it is simply saying that any information which is in graphic format will be completely invisible to search engines.
That's a fact of life.
If your name is "Mary Bloggs" then you want the search engines to bring up your site when someone searches for "Mary Bloggs". But if the only time "Mary Bloggs" appears on your website it's in a graphic logo without any text alternative, "Mary Bloggs" will be invisible to spiders and your site won't appear on any search for "Mary Bloggs".
Don't be fooled into thinking that having "Mary Bloggs" in your keywords will work - some spiders simply ignore keywords due to past widespread abuse; others will look at the keywords but if a keyword does not then appear anywhere in the actual page text, most spiders will ignore it.
You didn't know that was how search spiders worked? You do now.
So, if you want your site to show up on Google and other search engines, you have a few options open to you.
- Invent a piece of software which will extract text from a graphic.
If you can do that, forget about building websites, you're about to make a vast fortune as you have just created one of the most revolutionary leaps forward in the history of information technology. - Try to persuade Google et al that they have to change the way they rank the information on websites.
Don't be too disappointed when they laugh at you. - Deliver all crucial information and links on your site as readable text.
If you use Flash, Javascripts etc, do not use them to actually deliver the crucial information, use them to enhance the presentation.
If you do not understand the difference between those two fundamental concepts then you shouldn't be building websites until you do.