Frames

You got frames? Then you won’t get any good positions in the search engines. It’s as simple as that. They’ve got to come out. In most cases, a site using frames will only have one page that search engines can see (the home page), and this page won’t have any content that search engines can use to classify your site. All search engines can see of your whole site is a bunch of HTML codes, and your site will be listed poorly, if at all. There is a <noframes> tag you can use for content, but this isn’t a real solution. If you care enough to read this far, you’ve got to kill the frames. Do it already.

Flash

Flash. Looks nice to humans. Flashy, even. But for search engines it’s about as much use as a chocolate teapot. They can’t read it. If you must use a lot of Flash on a page then you have to make sure you have as much copy text as possible on the page too, and great meta and title tags. If you have Flash hyperlinks on your site, search engines can’t follow these either. You need to create them in HTML as well, and then search engines can crawl and index the rest of your site. Another way to get round this problem is to create an HTML site map and then link this (in HTML) to all your pages. This will keep the engines coming back to crawl your content. Otherwise, your site will be just a Flash in the pan.

Image Maps for Navigation

You’ll never guess what. Image Maps are no use for search engines either. As above, you need to replace these if at all possible. If you want to keep these Image Maps, then we would recommend adding regular links below the Image Map. A last resort is to use an HTML site map linked by HTML to all pages.

Javascript

Search engines can't follow links that are within Javascript, so your site will not get spidered if you’re reliant on a Javascript link. Period. As with the Flash and the Image Maps, the best choice is to replace the Javascript with standard HTML links. If, for some unfathomable reason, you absolutely must have Javascript hyperlinks, then use the HTML site map workaround. That is, create an HTML site map to link to every page on your site. Then add a standard HTML link on each page of your site that links to the site map.

That’s it for Part One. If you follow these tips you will hopefully have allowed search engines to crawl every page on your site, which means all these pages can be indexed and can appear in search engines. However, just because the kitchen door is open it doesn’t mean that there are good things to eat in there.

If you have any questions about SEO or need any help implementing my recommendations, please feel free to contact me on huwthomas@leadgenerators.co.uk

Next time we’ll look at stocking up your keyword larder in Part 2: Choosing tasty keywords.

Bon app é tit!

Huw Thomas