CHAPTER 26: Improving Natural Search Engine Ranking
FIGURE 26-5
This drop-down navigation system was built using JavaScript, so search engines will never see it.
Consider creating a sitemap page and ensuring it can be reached easily from your home page, then link to every page in your site from that sitemap. This is a great way to provide easy access for the search engines.
Images and an Absence of Text Search engines need text to read. If you don’t give them text, there’s nothing much for them to index. And text means actual typed words on a web page, not words appearing in images. Many designers create much of the site in an image-editing program, then drop the images into pages. Some sites even contain all or most of the text in the images. Apart from the fact that in most cases this is a very inefficient way to build a web site and that doing so creates very large, slow-loading pages, it also creates pages with nothing for the search engines to index . . . pages that won’t rank well in the search results. Let’s say you have a stock-photo business; you don’t need many words, you just need to present the pictures on your web site and let visitors pick the ones they want. However, the fact is that without text, search engines don’t have anything to index, so if you provide hundreds of pages with nothing but pictures, you’re not giving the search engines enough to work with.
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