I'm
not getting spidered, why?
Frames:
There
are many pitfalls in design that can
hinder a spiders ability to completely (or
even partially) index the content within a
given page. One of the biggest mistakes
webmasters are still making is that of
using "frames".
Frames
are a design convention used to utilize independent
scrollable regions within a single URL
designation (or so it appears). Frames are
actually divided into multiple URL
designations and are generally not
spiderable by the search engines.
I do not want to get into how to optimize
framed sites here as this is a tutorial
about "proper SEO" not
"patchwork SEO" if you have
frames in your website then my advice is
to redesign, as you can use CSS to give an
equivalent effect if that scroll down is
really something you are not willing to
give up. I will however be writing an
article for those of you who are absolutely
unwilling to give up your frames so that
you can at least provide something for the
spiders to love you for and thus improve
your rankings somewhat but these
techniques are far inferior to just
building your website the right way in the
first place.
JavaScript
Again,
real pretty but excessive use is generally
not necessary. Don't get me wrong even I
use JavaScript on almost all of my sites
but the key is to use it sparingly. The
reason for this is that spiders cannot
read JavaScript and thus any link or text
portrayed by such JavaScript will not be
counted in your indexing and thus produce
lost opportunity. My suggestion is for all
webmasters to "STOP USING JAVASCRIPT
FOR NAVIGATION" use HTML text links
instead. Your images can be called in Java
as with your pretty little rollovers but
when it comes to things you want indexed
Java is not the way to go.
Pack
your JavaScript away
When
calling JavaScript editors place the Java protocols
in header of your page: In order to save
file size and maximize load times cut out
that java protocol and paste it in an
external file (i usually call mine java.js)
then to call the java I place just this
one line of code: <Script src="java.js"></script>
this reduces the file size
considerably with no adverse side effects.
Flash
Myself,
I love flash. In fact my favorite sites
all incorporate some type of flash into
their design but the key phrase here is
"some flash". To have a site
with a flash image is great, it will
impress your visitor and increase the esthetic
quality of your site for sure, but this
flash must still be accompanied by a
healthy portion of good old fashioned
text, written in html, and readily
accessible to the SE spiders. Also, if it
absolutely necessary to use flash
navigation (which it never is) then make
sure to include html text link
counterparts so that your internal pages
will be found and indexed. It is possible
to embed text into flash but that is for
another article...