6 steps to making your site search engine ready

Over the years of running thesitewizard.com, I have had numerous webmasters write to me asking why their web pages do not appear in the search engine results page even though they directly search for terms that should yield their page. More often than not, a quick visit to their site reveals that they have created a web page that is not search engine friendly.

This article brings together some of the main points on how you can create a website or blog that is search engine friendly.

1.
Add Text to Your Images, Flash and Videos

The first thing you should note about search engines is that their software can only read text. When I say text, I don't mean text that you embed in an image or text that you place inside a Flash file or those that appear in a video. I mean text like the text you see everywhere on thesitewizard.com's articles - plain, unadulterated, ordinary text.

While it's true that some search engines have the rudimentary ability to scan a Flash file, you cannot assume that this ability is sophisticated enough to obtain all the information you want them to have. In fact, I suspect that only Google can do this, and even then only to extract straightforward links embedded in the file. And certainly no search engine I know can view an image file or video and determine the text that it contains.

This is not to say that you cannot create a photo-album site, Flash game site or a video site that ranks in the search engine results page. You can still place your pictures, Flash, videos on your site. However, you should write content for each of these non-text elements to describe them.

For example, you should describe each picture in the "alt" text for the image. For those who don't know what I'm saying, images are put into a web page using HTML code like the following:


Notice the "alt" part in the example HTML code above. Here, I described the image as a picture of a search engine ready website. You should of course replace that text with a brief description of what your image really shows. While search engines cannot actually see your picture, they can read your "alt" text and will include that in their index for your web page.

Likewise, for sites with video files or Flash file, you should include additional text on that web page describing what your video shows or what the Flash file does.

To put it another way, when designing your website, make your website more accessible for blind and other visually impaired visitors and you will also reap the side benefit of making your site more search-engine friendly.
2.
Validate Your HTML Code

I have written elsewhere on the importance of validating your web page. By validating, I mean checking to make sure that your HTML code does not have errors. Note that I'm not talking about spelling or grammar errors here. I'm referring to the underlying HTML code that allows the web browser to format your web page according to how you want it to appear. If you use a WYSIWYG web editor like Dreamweaver, Nvu or KompoZer, such code is usually generated behind the scenes by the editor as you type your text.

Whether you write your HTML code by hand or use a WYSIWYG web editor, it is a good idea to always run the final code through HTML and CSS validators. You can find details on how you can do this in my article on HTML validation at http://www.thesitewizard.com/webdesign/htmlvalidation.shtml

While the search engines don't care whether your HTML code is error-free, they rely on the basic correctness of the code to find out which portions of your web page to index. If your HTML code contains errors, it is possible that only portions of your web page are included in the search engine's database. The errors, while undetectable in a web browser, may lead the search engine software to think that some of the text on your page is part of the HTML formatting information rather than your site's content. As a result, the search engine may ignore that text, and your web page will not be shown in its results page.
3.
Create Relevant Title Tags

Many search engines give additional weightage to the text appearing in the HTML