Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Troubleshooting: how search engines can misunderstand your web pages

This is a common problem. Your web designer has created a beautiful page with nice graphics and great Flash animations. Unfortunately, it seems that search engines won't list your website no matter what you do.

This can have several reasons:

a) The HTML code of your web pages is meaningless to search engines

Search engines use very simple software programs to index your web pages. A web page that looks great to the human eye can be totally meaningless to search engines.

Search engines cannot see content that is presented in images (GIF, JPEG, PNG, etc.), Flash elements, JavaScript and other script languages or other multimedia file formats.

If you use JavaScript links for your website navigation then search engines might not be able to find your website page.

b) The HTML code of your web page contains errors

Some HTML errors can prevent search engine spiders from indexing your web pages. While most search engine spiders can deal with minor code errors, some of them will send faulty information to search engine spiders.

For example, your web page could contain a tag at the top of the page that tells search engines "the web page ends here" although your main content has not been reached.

c) The HTML code of your web pages doesn't contain the right elements

If you want to get high rankings for a special keyword then this keyword must appear in the right places on your web page. For example, it usually helps to use the keyword in the web page title.

There are many other elements that are important if you want to have high rankings.

source: free-seo-news