The Art of SEO

Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines

The first step is to ensure that your site can be found and crawled by search engines. This is not as simple as it sounds, as there are many popular web design and implementation constructs that the crawlers may not understand.

Indexable Content

To rank well in the search engines, your site’s content—that is, the material available to visitors of your site—must be in HTML text form. Images, Flash files, Java applets, and other nontext content is, for the most part, virtually invisible to search engine spiders despite advances in crawling technology.

Although the easiest way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place the content in the HTML text on the page, more advanced methods are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles. For example, images in GIF, JPEG, or PNG format can be assigned alt attributes in HTML, providing search engines with a text description of the visual content. Likewise, images can be shown to visitors as replacements for text by using CSS styles, via a technique called CSS image replacement.

Spiderable Link Structures

As we outlined in Chapter 2, search engines use links on web pages to help them discover other web pages and websites. For this reason, website developers should invest the time to build a link structure that spiders can crawl easily. Many sites make the critical mistake of hiding or obfuscating their navigation ...