SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible

formatting options for body text: Only use keywords where appropriate and avoid stuffing keywords

into your site simply to improve your search engine rankings. If you use those tactics, it’s likely they

will fail.

Making your web site’s body text visible (or readable) to search engine crawlers isn’t all that com-

plicated. Even so, many site designers still struggle with the issue, because there are certain text

styles that cannot be indexed by search engines. These styles are often used on web sites in an

effort to improve the appearance of the site. Some of the text visibility issues that site designers

contend with include:

 Text embedded in JavaScript applications or Macromedia Flash files.

 Text contained in image files (including those with these extensions: jpg, gif, png, bmp).

 Text that is accessible only on a submission form or other portion of the page that requires

some action or interaction with the user.

If search engine crawlers can’t see your web-site text, they can’t index that content for visitors to

find. So having “seeable” content is essential to ranking well and getting properly indexed. In some

cases, you must use a graphic, a special type of formatting like JavaScript or Flash, or even forms

that contain text. If you must use these unreadable forms of text, try to optimize your site by using

keywords in headings, title tags, URLs, and alt tags on the page. Just remember that you shouldn’t

go overboard with embedding keywords into headings, or other tags.

Never try to hide text on your site in an attempt to “fool” search engine crawlers into

thinking your site is something it’s not. If you try to include text on your site that’s the

same color as the background, or if you use other types of CSS tricks, you run the risk of being detected

by search engine crawlers. And even if those crawlers don’t detect your trickery, it’s just a matter of time

before some competitor or even one of your users discovers your dishonesty and reports your actions.

Writing well for search engines is both an art and a science, and is covered in more depth in

Chapter 11.

Alt tags

If you use images on your web pages, it’s good practice to include alt tagsfor all those images. Alt

tags are the alternative text that’s displayed on your site while a graphic is loading or if it doesn’t load

at all. They also make your site more accessible to visually impaired people who might be using text

readers. And these tags are another place where you might want to include your keywords to help

boost keyword frequency and improve search engine rankings. Even if your site is already content

rich and that content is tagged for optimization, alt tags allow you to reinforce your most important

keywords within the context of the site content.

There is a lot of debate over how valuable alt tags actually are in search engine optimization. They

have been drastically abused by some web designers who fill the alt tags with streams of keywords

rather than accurate descriptions of the images they are meant to represent. But they are required

for standards-based HTML web sites, and can play a small role in helping to improve your search

CAUTION CAUTION

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