Search Engine Optimization: The problem with flashy sites

You have a website. Or maybe your competition has a website. It doesn't matter. How can you tell whether you have "the edge" or not?

One problem with many modern sites is that the web designer is more concerned with developing a flashy portfolio than with whether or not your customers can find you. If someone is looking for your type of business in your area -- say they put "business type City" into a search engine -- will your business make the grade?

First let's define a little criteria here: Optimally you'll be on the first page of the results. Acceptably, you'll be within the first 2-3 pages of results, after all there's a LOT of competition out there, a search can come up with hundreds of pages, and perhaps "City" is not specific enough (if I put in "Orange" thinking Orange County, NY -- or even "Orange County" -- nearly everything that shows up is Orange County, CA).

Aside from running around polling every search engine with every criteria you can, here's some down-and-dirty methods to make sure your site design allows search engines not only find the first page of your website, but other pages in your site as well:

Open a browser -- wait, you're viewing this page, so you must already be in a browser! :)
Point your mouse at a link on this page. Look at the bottom of the window to see where the link points.
- On every browser I checked (Safari, Firefox & Internet Explorer 6) if the Status bar is not visible, you can go to the menu View -> Status Bar -- which then adds a little bar at the bottom of the browser window. When you point to a link, the address of the link shows up in the status bar. Try it out on this page to get a feel of what it should look like. EVERY link should show something like "http://www.eclectictech.net/Group/PageName".
Open another browser window, and navigate to your website.
Point to links on your page. Any and all links -- in the sidebars, navigation menus, footers, headers, embedded inside the text. Go to a few other pages, check the links there too.
- If "http://www.yourdomain.com/" is at the beginning of your links, this is a great sign! "mailto:name@yourdomain.com" is OK, but you probably see a lot of spam emails at that address -- that's something for another article. Your site's probably good to go!
- If you get things like this: "Go to # on this page" or "Done" or something that starts with "javascript:" you may have problems. See the next section on viewing source.

Brief intro to "View Source"

If link URLs (universal resource locators -- web addresses) don't show up in your status bar, you might have a website with Flash or JavaScript navigation. Google and other website search engines do not and can not follow those links. How do you know if your links are a problem?

You can look at the source of the pages.

That sounds pretty scary. I know. Looking at the HTML and other code behind a website is daunting. But I'll show you exactly what it is that you're looking for:

While you're looking at your web page select View -> Source or View -> View Source in your browser
you are looking for real HTML links. The most index-able sites use ONLY HTML links.
- HTML links are called "anchors", thus they start with "a". Example (taken from this page):

     <a class='wikilink' 
        href='http://www.eclectictech.net/Info/HomePage'>

you can do a "find" on the page source for "<a" or for "href=" to quickly find links
the relevant part of the link, if you find any, is what follows the "href=". That is what the search engine will follow to find other pages on your website. On some sites, the only REAL link on the page is the reference back to the design firm that created the site, which is either ignorant or nasty -- you decide.

Flash
- If you open up the source of the page, and are greeted with only a few sparse lines of code, you may have a Flash movie site. Note, I said movie. It's an interactive movie, but a movie anyway. Here's an example of the code behind a flash website:

<body>
      <object 
             classid="clsid:TGECREN-CH8EN-1cgf-9658-4928220000" 
             width="800" height="600">
        <param name="movie" value="mywebsite.swf">
        <param name="quality" value="high">
        <embed src="mywebsite.swf" quality="high" 
             type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="800"  
             height="600"></embed>
      </object>
</body>

Trust me when I say that a search engine won't find anything interesting about this.

Where do you go from here

If your site links are good, there are probably many other things that can be done to optimize your website for the search engines. Some are complex, but the best advice I have on this is to have a site with rich relevant content, that has strongly worded descriptive links to other pages within the site, and a few, but not too many, links to related materials outside of the site. Search engine "web crawlers" (programs that index websites) are getting smarter and smarter, and what they want is content-rich and topic-relevant material. If you try to fool them, you have to be very clever or they will remove you from their lists.

If your site links are not good, your first call should be to the people who created your website. If that's not possible, or they want to charge an exorbitant fee to fix their mistakes, go to a Search Engine Optimization-aware designer, like Eclectic Tech, LLC, to correct their mistakes. Don't be fooled by the words "Search Engine Optimization" on a designer or web programmer's website. Audit their work, make sure their links are real. Find out how to check PageRanks for their sites in Google, and check out their Google listings.