It seems that a lot more emphasis is put on search engine optimalization (seo) the few months than it has before. Today I’ve been explaining to a client how he needs to write his text in order to be found easier on search engines. So let’s write a small post about seo.

Flash
One of the things search engines struggle with badly are flash sites. The content is hidden away from the search engine so it can’t decide what your site is about. Just a menu in flash is bad as well, the search engine won’t find the links as easily as it would otherwise. Also, having a whole site in just 1 flash page makes for less links to yourself. A website with 5000 pages is indexed higher than 1 with just 5, or even just 1.

How to solve that? Well, if you want your site to be found by everyone, don’t use flash. But alternatively, if you do feel you need to, make sure you add your links as plain (commented out) content as well. Also, your text can be added this way. This isn’t a perfect nor failsafe solution however. Good things are coming however, slowly. Adobe (previously Macromedia) came out with SDK the flash search engine tool. With this a search engine can decompile flashmovies into html pages which contain the content of the swf.

robots.txt
Now this might not be the first thing you think about, but it’s quite important. Lately a few major search engines (amongst which MSN) got massive complaints about their spider (MSNBot) not following the rules laid down in the robots.txt. So, they changed it and made it much stricter. So strict in fact it seems to get confused when no robots.txt is present. Also, without a robots.txt a site is often not spidered as deeply as without.

So, find out how to write a robots.txt and add it to your site, it’s the first easy step to having your website found.

The best name for a search engine is “inktomi slurp”. Currently known as slurp. This one is from Yahoo.

Content
This is one of the more important things in seo. Keywords. Find out what people are looking for when they need to find you. For example, if I would do webdesign, chances are my keywords are probably websites and design. Not webdesign, as most people don’t want their site to be designed, they just want a site.

You try and figure out what people will search for when they need to find YOU. Make a list of about 10 words, more won’t work. Then, you write your text so that you actually use those words. Also, make sure your page names fits your list of keywords. This way, when someone links to you, the link will show what your sites about already.

Links
So, I said links in the last sentence. And links is the magic word in seo. But, only quality links count. A search engine decide in a number of different ways how important your site is for a specific keyword. (People look for keywords remember?) Now, if a site links to me, and that site is also important for that keyword, I will get some extra credits for that keyword as well.

At the moment there is some controversy whether it works the other way around as well. So, if someone links to me from a site about yellow pudding my rating for multimedia engineering would drop as obviously my site is about something else. Wether it actually works like this, I would think not. It makes it too easy to pull your competitor down, instead of lifting yourself up. Making seo a mudtrowing game very quickly. The final word about that is not yet in however.

Dynamic pages
A lot of sites (especially sites which use a framework) use one page, which links through to all others, and many more have a hundreds of pages, which are linked to with something like /index.php?cat=flash&id=12. This is horrible to read and remember for people to start with. But it’s also bad for search engines. Content is frequently seen as being on but one page. And thus, not indexed correctly. Since most search engines pentalize for bad content this is something that needs to be fixed.

Good thing there’s rewrite rules. Put them in your .htaccess file, of in the httpd.conf if you use apache. This can change the url to your page into something a lot more readable.

Build a good site
The best piece of advice however is, build a good site, write interesting and unique content on it, and update regularly. Make sure people have a reason to go to your site, because they can find what they want their. From there things will flow naturally, you’ll get links, you’ll get page rank, and after the next google dance you’ll see how far you’ve jumped.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2005 at 11:35 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment, Flash, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.