Newsletter
| October, 2005 Is your web site not showing up on search engines? The reason may lie in how your site was built. There are two web-based technologies that can actually prevent search engines from indexing your site. Both have been around awhile but using them in your site can cause problems for your site's visibility. Flash and Frames do different things but both can cause problems for you if you want higher indexing. Flash: What it is Flash is a rich media technology used to incorporate animation, games and other aspects into a web site that HTML cannot. Content, links, images and animation can be fully customized to give the user a highly branded and richly designed experience. It is a wonderful medium that is effective in the right context. Why it's a problem Sites built entirely in Fash are virtually invisible to search engines because Flash sites are basically composed of a single file. Unlike HTML sites which are a series of files (pages) with content and code that search engines can read, a Flash file is closed to a search engine. All pages, content and images are contained within that file. When a search engine spider comes across a Flash site all it will see is a file within an HTML page. With no content to index the spider will move on. You can still use Flash in your site Flash is a great medium and can add a lot to a web site. Instead of building the whole site in Flash, add components to the site. These components can be used to explain in ways that static images or text could not. A good example is: www.seatbeltbags.com Frames: What it is Frames pulls several web pages into one browser screen. This way a banner and or a navigation bar can always stay at the top of the screen without moving, while the content below can scroll. Why it's a problem Search engines don't just look at the content in the body of a site. To index a site a search engine spider will look at information in the head portion of a web page. The head contains the page title and meta tags. A spider will look at the content in the head and compare it to the content in the body of a web page. Relevance between the meta tags and the content creates better conditions for higher indexing. Only the home page of a site built in frames has a head. However, that page often does not have it's own content because it pulls in other pages that do contain the content. As a result a spider can only see the head of the page but not the content. In addition, the other pages are generally cut off from the spider. In some cases sites that use either of these technologies are not completely invisible, they can be found through a search engine. However, to maximize your indexing potential our advice is stay away from frames all together. If you use flash use it as a component of your site rather than creating your whole site in flash. Back to the Newsletter page Sign up to get your copy of the Pylon Page |
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