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Search Engines-Please 
Crawl My Content

By Vickie J. Scanlon


Are the search engines finding your content? No. Well then, it's time to look at your SEO and your web design. Why do I say design? If you add too much flash, you may find that the search engines will only partially index your site, or back out completely for fear that they may get stuck and crash their system.

You're probably doing a mental checklist now. If not, let me help you. So you have your quality content, with keywords laboriously put within to draw traffic; and your meta tags and meta title are set, and you made use that the correct web page name was chosen before developing the page. So what's left?


Search Engines Not Indexing My Content

Do you have flash content? Granted it looks great, it's quick to download and it's even supplied you with animation. But did you consider what the search engines think of it? Well, sad to say, if you're counting on the Flash content to draw the search engines- it won't happen. Search engines are not able to index text within a Flash file. So if you want to use Flash, make sure it's not within the content/text you want the search engines to see.

Are you using images for your navigation? Looks great, but -- search engines cannot read images. They can only read alt tags within the html code of the image. Translated, if you're a one-man operation your navigation should not be made up of images.

JavaScript -- For the search engines, JavaScript is a bump in the crawling process. They hit a JavaScript bump -- they bounce over the code, and continue to read. Translated JavaScript offers no content for search engines. My advice, if you need JavaScript on the home page, put it toward the bottom of the page. 

Frames - Frames are great, but search engines may have a difficult time getting through to the code you want indexed. And, if they have a problem, they leave.

Dynamic links - If you have Dynamic pages or links you may have a problem with the search engines indexing your site. Usually dynamic pages or links are coded in such scripting languages as CGI, ASP, PHP, Perl, Cold Fusion, JSP and others. Google and some of the other search engines can handle simple dynamic urls, but if the query parameters get to long or complicated (having more than one ? for example) their crawler will ignore the link completely.

Though many of the website techniques do add a lot of flash to your site, you also have to be aware of what you want more of - flash and dazzle or search engine indexing of all of your web pages? Can you have some flash? Yes. But use all sparingly and know that it is only to be used to enhance your page and not be intermingled with the content. If a search engine finds the code to be cumbersome to handle, they may remove itself and thus, remove your opportunity of being indexed.


About Author:

Vickie J Scanlon -- Visit  My Affiliate Place for articles, ebooks, SEO information, internet security software,  business software and computer deals for home office and business.

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