by: Keith Finley
Printer-friendly version
Reprint permission available by request
Many website owners are, to put it mildly, "concerned" about their website's placement with search engines, particularly with the industry leader, Google. Yet websites are increasingly designed to fly in the face of Google's publicly-stated guidelines.
Here's how to tell if your website designer is lying to you. When you ask the above question, your designer should answer, "I don't know," "who knows?," or even "beats me." Answers leading in other directions, such as dates or time estimates, are lies.
The truth is that even Google may not know. They use an elaborate 100-point system for analyzing websites and bestowing search rank. Although Google freely posts "Webmaster Guidelines" on their website, much of their advice isn't heeded in current design trends.
One such guideline is that new websites may submit their URL to Google for inclusion into the Google database. No one can pay for placement on Google's search results, so this free submission is the only way to go (Visit Google to submit your website).
Also on Google's mind is the fact that "fancy features" such as flash are unreadable by Google's crawler, which searches the web for inclusion into Google's database. If most of your site's content appears as part of a flash presentation, then most of your site's content is invisible to Google. Incredibly, many websites today are designed entirely in flash, excluding themselves from search engines and visitors lacking flash in order to avoid internet advertising (Join them and download the flash uninstaller).
Search engines also cannot read pictures, even if the pictures contain plenty of words. Pictures should be used to augment a website's pages, with normal text on the page delivering the content.
Pictures, special effects and flash should help tell the story, not tell all of it.
The best insight into the mind of Google requires a journey, way back to 2004. "The Way You Move" by Outkast is tearing up the charts, and Google has quietly redesigned their search engine. Websites that for years enjoyed top rankings have now vanished from search results. Scores of web designers and "search engine optimizer" practitioners do not know what hit them.
What hit them, in a nutshell, was this: Google introduced a new algorithm that ignored websites using search engine tricks.
Still in use by some, such tricks include: repeating keywords in order to gain "relevance" in the search engine's eyes; using invisible text (white text on white background) for the same reason; and exchanging links, both visible and invisible, with other webmasters solely to boost ratings. Google's current algorithm weeds out sites using these tactics, returning the most relevant results while excluding "optimized" results.
This milestone in internet history sent website designers and owners scrambling for substance for their websites instead of smoke and mirrors. Thanks to Google's efforts, good web designers now fill their websites with the only trick that always works: quality content.