SEO and Facts About Visual Extras

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Search Engine Optimization and Facts about Visual Extras

While it is relatively easy to optimize your web page for search engines in terms if text by including keywords and key phrases, optimizing your web site so that the visual elements such as images, sounds, flash animations or JavaScript elements will attract visitors is harder. Search engine will not index pages based on these elements in the same manner they index sites based on the included text. What you have to do is to be sure to include relevant descriptions for each of these elements if you want to attract visitors, which use major search engines. When it comes to indexing visual elements, current search engines perform similarly, to how they indexed text pages a couple of years ago. Back then, you had to provide a meaningful description in the web page's metatag for search engines to index them.

It is hard to imagine a modern web site without visual elements and among them, images are the most frequently used. While providing a better understanding of text articles on your page, helping you describe better your products and services and allowing for a more appealing web page aspect, information included in images are considered invisible by search engines. For example, you cannot use search engines to find out a specific element found inside a picture. Search engines cannot read image files, so any information contained by them is lost from the search engine's perspective. So it is imperious necessary to find the proper balance between the site's visual appealing and its search engine optimizations. You do not have to avoid including images on your web site because search engines cannot look inside them. As stated before, they are important elements belonging to the web page's visual aspect and helps visitors had better understand the information presented. You have to find a way, however, to take some seo benefits from your images as well. Keeping that in mind, the images on your web page should be used only for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse, for displaying text inside them. When including images on your site, be sure to prove a meaningful description in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag. Also, consider giving appropriate names to images instead of using the usual “image01” and “image02” names. Search engines will look into the textual description and the images' names and in this way, you will benefit from the visual elements as well as from the included keywords.

Animations and movies are another type of visual elements that have found a way into modern web and visually appealing websites. If included correctly, they will provide you with great benefits from the artistic point of view, but, as with images, any information included in them will be invisible for search engines. Many web designers make the mistake of making extensive use of flash animation to describe what they could have described with keyword-rich text to make the site more appealing visually. While indeed a beautiful site, search engines will not consider that animation when indexing your page, no matter how relevant it may be for your site's content. A method to gain some seo benefits from flash animation and movies is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie (be sure however to exclude the original Flash movie from indexing, as you may be penalized by the search engine for duplicated content). Until search engine technologies will be able to read and take flash animations into consideration when indexing web pages, be sure to provide a textual description of the movie.

Using frames in your web site presents a couple of delicate problems, but the good news is that web designers are starting to give up frames when building web sites. The issue is that search engines find it hard to index framed pages, as he URL of the page is the same, no matter which separate frame is open. The search engine sees multiple pages, but only one URL and it is mistakes by this fact. While frames begin to loose popularity, there are ways to optimize your site for search engines if you still want to include frames or to modify an existing framed web page. If this is the case, provide a meaningful description of the site in the <noframes> tag.

JavaScript elements are preferred by many web designers for the multiple benefits they can bring. But things are not simple at all when it comes to using JavaScript elements and optimizing your web site for search engines. HTML is beginning to show its limits, mainly because this technology was not intended to be a programming language for building Web applications. So you cannot use it to build complex databases or to store session information, requirements of modern web servers. Instead, web developers use other technologies in addition to HTML, technologies such as JavaScript or PHP. When a search engine sees a JavaScript element in a web page, it ignores it. This can be a real downside if you have a link inside a piece of JavaScript code, as that link will not be indexed by search engine bots. Another thing that you must be aware of is the fact that if JavaScript is in the HTML file itself, it will clutter the html file and search engine spiders might just as well skip it and move to the next site. There are methods that are alternatives to running the script in the browser, but it requires pretty complex programming and it is very hard for web developers to include it efficiently in the web pages they are building.

Search engines and the technologies used by them is on a constant change: just imagine where they are today compared to where they started only 10 years ago. Thins will evolve and in the future they will be able to read and take into consideration pieces of information included in visual elements, such as images, flash animations and movies, or certain JavaScripts. Until that moment arrives, you have to find workarounds for these limitations if you want these visual elements to be key parts of your search engine optimization process.