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Everyone is interested in increasing their search engine visibility, yet they often overlook the basic principles of Search Engine “Pessimization”, making it exceptionally difficult for Google and others to see their landing pages.
Before you invest time and money into fully optimizing for search, you must do these three very simple things to prevent Google and other search engines from overlooking your landing page or giving it an extremely poor rank.
Additionally, if you have already implemented an SEO project, you should check to see if these items were missed.
Google Doesn’t Understand Your Images
Titles, headings, and key quotations are not visible in graphics formats. Therefore, any content that needs to be searchable should always be in plain text form. If images are required, place ALT attributes on all graphics that take the place of plain text. Thus:
WRONG: <img src=”/images/headline.jpg”>
NOT SO GOOD: <img src=”/images/headline.jpg” alt=”This is the headline!”>
BEST: <h1>This is the headline</h1>
Correct use of plain text and ALT attributes additionally makes your site more accessible to anyone who is blind, has impaired vision, or is just using a low-resolution display or a low-bandwidth link. For free!
Google has Only Limited Understanding of Dynamic Content
If your landing page is simply a page consisting of only Flash design, create alternate search-friendly content, as well. Google executes some JavaScript, but not all, so be sure your key content is accessible without popups; or, put equivalent text into a <NOSCRIPT> tag.
If your menus are JavaScript, you should place HREF-style links to all menued content. Doing this not only makes your site more search-friendly, it also makes for a better user experience for those who do not have JavaScript installed or the ability to use it adeptly.
Create and Upload a Sitemap
Sitemaps inform Google of the URLs that are available for crawling, and to give search users a nicely formatted listing of the key pages on your site. A good Sitemap is easy to make just by following the examples provided by Google (search ” google sitemap protocol” in Google). Sitemaps are typically uploaded to the root (top-level) directory of your domain.
Implementing these fast and simple techniques will avoid making Google cry when it visits your site and help searchers find your content.
Mark W. Schumann, who makes software projects not suck, shares his paper on the eight ways that projects go bad, and how to fix them, at http://criticalresults.com/freestuff.html.
Download the entire FeedFront issue 6 here – http://feedfront.com/feedfront-issue6.pdf
FeedFront issue 6 articles can be found here as well: http://feedfront.com/archives/article00date/2009/06
