SEO and website design
Another important area you should investigate early in your SEO campaign is to make sure that your site design is search engine friendly.
Keeping the spiders happy
Search engines use software robots called spiders to search the web to find and record web pages to add to the search engines index.
Almost everyone is aware of the need to have an attractive and informative site to attract and keep the attention of their visitors, but many of us fail to also consider our site from the viewpoint of the busy little spiders who have to crawl the pages and report the results to the search engines.
Being software robots, spiders take no notice of your fancy Flash intros, stunning graphics, superb sounds and your clever java script applications. Instead they have to feel their way blindly around your site, using only those invisible tools you have thoughtfully provided them. The easier you can make this task and the more closely you follow their specifications, the easier it is for them to do their jobs and at the very least they may spider your site more often, and in extreme cases it can even affect your site rankings.
You should be aware that some spiders may not be able to read Flash enabled pages, image maps, dynamic pages with too many parameters passed, password protected pages and .pdf files. Many search engines, with Google leading the pack, are now able to spider and rank some of these problem cases, but others are not.
Flash and spiders
At the present time Google is able to not only able to read, but to index and rank pages base on Flash (.swf file types), while other search engines can read but do not appear to index or rank based on the text content of Flash pages.
The use of the <noembed> tag will help your Flash pages to be indexed and ranked by all the major search engines.
Next lets take a look at designing pages for spiders.
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