Article > SEO Friendly Websites

SEO Friendly Websites

1) Flash Websites (Don't be Fooled)

I'll try to keep this short and to the point and not deal with the technical stuff...

If you have a "Flash Website"  your website is dead, no one can find it on the Internet using search terms etc.  A flash website is simply a bunch of pages, animated images, audio and possibly video all rendered together as a complete movie and place on one page in a webpage known as the landing or home page.

Flash cannot be read by search engines no matter what you hear out there.   As one of my previous customers said "No wonder why we never got one email or lead or sale in the past two years".  Unfortunately their webmaster was leading them down the yellow brick road to bankruptcy. All along telling them that the search engines were just slow to index their website. 

Their website was pretty and cool to look at, but no leads, no sales and no profit from their online presence.

2) Small Flash Movies On Your Home page / Landing page

It's simply not a good idea to put flash on your home or landing page of your website. Search engines cannot read even the smallest of flash movies. The code cannot be deciphered by the spiders... So keep your cool flash stuff to a minimum and put it somewhere else in a non-critical webpage.

3) Javascript Menus

Nice professional, cool looking Java-script menus that expand, dropdown, change colors, blink, or change an image is all code that the search engines cannot read and typically the search engine will penalize your site for not being seo friendly.

 

4) Javascript & Flash Image Viewers
 

Although sometimes image viewers are necessary to show your product or services, try very hard to keep them off of the home / landing page. They have their place and really can be a benefit to your website. But not on your critical pages and not on every page.

"Holey Cow Batman! Now my website is going to look terrible and visitors won't like our website".

 

Fortunately this is what Batmans' Computer had to say about that...

You can still have a very professional and attractive website even without the flash and java-script eye-candy.

Your menu will be straight text links, that search engines love to index.

Your header can still have nicely laid out professional images embedded into the background of the web page.

Your home / landing page will have lots of pertinent content that the search engines love

Your Title tags will be geared toward what your target audience is typically searching for

Your Keyword density will be appropriate throughout your website.

And most importantly, Your content will be addressing the issues of your visitor to motivate them to do one of two things... Buy your products and/or services  OR  leave their contact information for you to contact them at a later time.

Statistics tell us that even though a website does not have bells and whistles, visitors are there for content, content and more content.  So if you want to achieve your sales goals, provide all the content you can, can, can.

On the other hand, this is not an excuse to make a amateurish looking website on your own.  We are all programmed to assume that a clean new looking package is somehow better than the package that was dropped on the floor, has a crunched corner and was put back on the shelf even though the product inside is still fine.  Don't crunch the corner of your website by doing it yourself.