ptg16476052692 LESSON 25: Search Engines and SEO
SEO Techniques
You can do some specific things with your HTML to make your web pages easier to read
and index for search engines. Your pages need to be well structured and indexable—in
other words, they must be friendly to search engines.Is Your Site “Friendly?”
Many people refer to a product as being “user friendly” as a way of saying that it’s easy
to use and people like using it. The same could be true of a website that is “search engine
friendly.” Search engines don’t read websites the way humans do, so it’s important to
structure your content in a way that the search engines can read it. For instance
n Your most important content should be in HTML text. Search engines find it
harder, if not impossible, to read text in images, Flash, Java applets, videos, and so
on. This content is often ignored completely by search engines. If it’s important,
write it out in text.
n Provide alternative text. If you must use things that are not readable by search
engines (like Flash, images, etc.), provide a text alternative. Use the HTML attri-
butes and features like the alt attribute on images or include alternate text inside
the video and audio tags. Everything should have a text alternative somewhere
on the page.
n Make your navigation crawlable. Include a text link to every page on your site
somewhere on the site. Note, I don’t mean you should include a text link to every
page on every page. The spiders can crawl from one page to the next and find all
the pages, as long as the text link exists somewhere. Link all your pages.
n Include transcripts to audio and video. As you learned in Lesson 22, “Designing
for User Experience,” including transcripts helps make your multimedia more
accessible, and it helps search spiders too. Make your pages accessible.
n Use correct HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Most spiders can navigate even the most
error-filled HTML, but they work better and more efficiently on pages that use
standards compliant code. Validate your pages.If these suggestions sound a lot like the accessibility you learned about in earlier lessons,
you’d be right. Search engine spiders are like a fairly limited AT (assistive technology)
device. If you try to make your site as accessible as possible, you will not only help
search engines better index your site, but you’ll also make them more accessible to your
human customers.