Basic strategies in SEO friendly web design
Search engines are unfortunately limited in how they interpret a site's content. Believe it or not, a webpage generally does not look the same to humans as it does to search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo. We will focus on specific aspects of creating (or modifying) webpages so they are structured for both search engines and human visitors alike. This information is not only useful for website owners, but is also essential for programmers, information architects designers and content creators because all involved in a site's construction can plan and develop a search-engine friendly site.
In order to have a noticeable return in a search engines, your most important content should be in HTML text format. Your images, Flash files, Java applets, and other non-text content are often ignored or devalued by search engine spiders, despite advances in crawling technology. The absolute best way to ensure that the words and phrases you display to your visitors are visible to search engines is to place your text in the HTML text on the page. However, more advanced options are available for those who demand greater formatting or visual display styles:
Images in .gif, .jpg, or .png format can be assigned “alt attributes” in HTML, providing that there is a search engine text description of the visual content.
Also note the following three things.
- Search boxes can be supplemented with navigation and crawlable links.
- Flash or Java plug-in contained content can be supplemented with text on the page.
- Video & audio content should have an accompanying transcript if the words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by the engines.
