Image Provided By Danny Sullivan

Running a site that is attractive, informative, and search engine optimized can be tricky. Many people follow the basic rules, like generating keyword rich content and filling in meta data, but forget the more complicated SEO coding. Here below are 3 to not forget!

1. Flash.

It makes your site dynamic, stand out, and “flashy.” But it also zaps some of the SEO value and opportunity from your site. Why?

Search engine spiders require content to scan in order to rank and categorize your site. Flash uses code that the search engine spiders cannot read or access. Therefore, the content contained within flash provides no SEO value since it will not be read. For this reason, inserting flash in your site is almost the SEO equivalent of leaving a big blank space where content should we. And what is big, blank space? Wasted.

Now, I’m not saying that you should never use flash. Just be choosey with it. Prime website real estate like your homepage should have the important pieces in text. If flash is used, be sure to put it in a place that won’t hurt your SEO. Remember, search engines read from the top left down to bottom right.

If you’re dead set on using dynamic content, try animated gif’s first. It won’t be as eye-popping, but at least you can make it SEO friendly with alt tags.

2. Embedding Text in Images.

Plain ol’ text can be boring sometimes. So you want to spruce it up with some pretty pictures, but you’re decided against flash. Still be careful about where your text is. Embedding important text in images can be dangerous. Like flash, search engines cannot read the content in your image. So if you have your navigation, company name, slogan, or any other important information in an image, the search engines cannot read it.

This is especially bad for navigation, since the text links used to connect pages are the basis of how Google crawls your site. Think of your main navigation as the map. Without that map, how does Google know here to go? Sitemaps can help in this case to guide the search engine, but why settle for a fix for such an unnecessary problem?

If the image contains major content about your site, the best thing to do in my opinion is to try designing around the problem. Talk with a web designer about your options. If the image in question does not contain critical content, make sure it’s image alt tag is present and accurate. You can also do other thing to SEO your images, but that’s another post.

3. Allowing Computers to Determine Your Permalink

Above I touched on the importance of links on your site. Links tell Google where you want it to go, but the text of those links are also important because it tells Google what page it is going to. All this is taken into account when Google scans and indexes your site.

The often forgotten about “link” though is the permalink in your address bar — the direct URL that if typed in will take you to the exact article or blog post you want. All too often people allow the text of this link to be determined by your computer. For blogs this may be the date (i.e. http:// theseoptimist.com/2009/October/26) or the file name  (i.e. http:// theseoptimist.com/337).

As you can see in both instances, no value is provided by these names. Depending on your blogging platform, there may be a quick and easy fix to this by installing a plug-in that allows you to set your permalink or pulls your permalink from the post title. If you are using a custom blogging platform, consult with your web developer. For web addresses replying on file names, simply rename files using keyword rich text. Problem solved.

Good luck!

~Andrea

Related Reading

SEO In Plain English (How Search Engines Work)