Chapter 6 – Visual Extras And SEO

It has been already illustrated that the search engines have no means to index extras like images, frames, movies, etc.  They tend to rely on the meaningful text description that allows them to index a file and the situation can be compared to say that occurred around 10 years ago.

  1. Images
    An integral component of the web page, and from the designer’s point of view they are extra, but essential for every site. But having said that the search engines and the designers are on opposite pages as for search engine every piece of information in an image is of no use.  You need to understand without images the website would have an ugly look to it and you need to use it for decoration along with illustrations. The best part is that it goes on to provide a description of the subject and it would not be a bad idea to give meaningful names to the file images.
  2. Movies and animation
    The situation here is as similar to the images, as from the designer’s point of view they are valuable but from the search engine point. It is a common scenario to come across a Flash introduction on your home page. You can figure out on what is the major advantage with search engine is that they happen to be ranking killer. It is bound to be worse when you can go on to convey a simple story in text and you are using flash. A turnaround in this regard would be to use HTML version  which will allow you to remove the original Flash movie from the indexing angle.
  3. Frames
    The fact is that frames are slowly and steadily disappearing from the web, and though it was a hit with the designers but never with the search engines. They tend to have a certain level of difficulty as indexing 3 to 4 pages is difficult when the URL happens to be the same. In case of search engines this was a major shock as there was one URL in the whole process and 3 to 4 pages. If you are still keen on using frames then you need to provide a meaningful description of your website in the no frames tag. For a beginner it is important as if you do not understand anything, it is the no frame tag that will help you.
  4. Java Script
    This is another hot piece of cake. All of us stand on one common ground that pure HTML is useless when it comes to building complex websites where a lot of functionality is needed. It was never intended to be a programming language that would help you to build web applications, so it was never expected that it would store information needed by the users of the web. The situation is that the search engines tend to ignore Java script that they come across on a page. The difficulty is that if you tend to have links in this regard they will not be spared.

SEO Tutorial – Chapter 7