Site Optimization: More Key Points to Remember - Don’t Hide Your Text
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You probably assume that search engine spiders can access all of the text on your pages, but can they? There are certain text styles that stop spiders cold. If you have any of the following on your website, you need to do a little rethinking.
- Text embedded in a Java application or Macromedia Flash file.
- Text within an image file. These files include jpg, gif, png, and others.
- Text that can be accessed only via a form submit or other on-page action.
With the technology getting better every day, this might change in the future, and spiders might learn how to read these styles of text. But for now, assume that any text in one of these formats cannot be read by spiders, and therefore is not getting indexed by the search engines. This means that visitors are not finding that page.
Search engine spiders, by and large, read text in HTML format very well. If you want to rank well in the SERPs, you need to put your text in that format. If you have web pages on which you must use a format that the search engines won’t be able to index, there are ways you can make up for this. Try to use the right keywords and phrases in your headlines, title tags, URLs and image/file names on the page. Be careful, though, because it is possible to go overboard.
In particular, do not try to hide any text. Some site builders and SEOs do this with CSS tricks or the simple tactic of making the text the same color as the background. These days, that’s considered to be a “black hat” SEO tactic. Even if the search engines can’t detect it automatically, your competition can certainly spot it. They would be happy to report your site to the search engines for keyword spamming, and that can get you banned entirely.
Now you know what not to do. But you’re probably thinking that isn’t much help. How do you get search engines to see what you want them to? Well, you need to write the right kind of text on your page. And that brings us to our next topic.
Next: Spider Friendly, Visitor Friendly >>
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