|
Copywriting TipsFlash Tricks For Improved Search Engine Rankings
by:
George Peirson
Normal wisdom says that if you use Flash in a web site it wish hurt your search engine placement. This is due primarily to search engines having a hard time to index Flash content. But with a little ingenuity we can use that really problem to our advantage.
Let’s 1st take a look at how search engine categorisation can cause you problems on your web site.
Most web sites are built up of menus and context areas. The menus are oft-times text based, production
them easy to update or change. The content is dependent on our writing creativity. Some
of these can lead to search engine categorisation trouble.
Search Engines look through the text on your pages, menus as well as content and they create their index on what they find. So far so good. But just how do the search engines do this? They can’t look at your page and decide which is the main content area visually, so they just start at the top of the code and activity down.
If your site follows the standard pattern of a navigation bar on either the top or down the left side of the page and uses a table structure to bring home the bacon this, then your whole nav bar wish be see and indexed before your main content area. If your site has a lot of variation then this shouldn’t be a problem. But what if your site is focused on one subject and your navigation bar tends to repeat words? As an example you may have a site that sells watches and your nav bar may see like this: Men’s Watches, Ladies Watches, Sport Watches, etc. You can see how easy it is to repeat that word Watches.
Search engines like to give points to sites that contain valuable content that is easily categorised and recognizable to visitors, but they likewise take away points for keyword spamming. In the above Watch example, the nav bar could easily cause your page to be listed as a keyword spammer.
Here is the 1st Flash Trick to improve your ranking. Create the navigation bar in Flash. This way all those continuation
words are now hidden from the search engine spiders. As an adscititious benefit the code taken up by the Flash wish probably be less than the code used in the text based nav bar. This wish help the search engine spiders to focus on the main content area of your page.
Let’s now look at another common problem with search engine indexing. In this example consider a buying site commercialism the same watches as in our previous example. Each watch page wish have a description of the individual watch, and that is fine. But each page may likewise have “boiler plate” text as well. There may possibly be a standard description for a particular watch brand, or possibly pledge or shipping information enclosed
on the page.
Another red flag that goes up for the search engine spiders is text continuation
from page to page. The more distinct each page is the more likely the search engines wish consider the text as relevant. If there is too more recurrent
text, the search engines may even as drop all the pages that they believe have duplicated text. Not a nice situation, especially if you don’t want to be forced into creating altogether innovational text for every page on your site.
Here is Flash Trick number two. Support all the distinct content on your pages as mark up
text and convert any continuation
text areas into Flash files that are placed into the pages. This way, only the distinct text is visible to the search engines and your continuation
text is hidden in the Flash file. Any text that you tend to repeat from page to page is a prime candidate for the Flash treatment.
So take a look through your web site. Do you have text menus that use repetitive words? Do you use boiler plate text, or have recurrent
text areas on some pages? If so you should let Flash’s disadvantage of being search engine unfriendly become your advantage on production
a search engine friendly site.
Just about the author:
Saint george Peirson is a flourishing Net
Trainer. He is the author of over 30 multimedia system based tutorial training titles covering such topics as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver. To see his else articles and see his training sets visit http://www.howtogurus.comArticle copyright 2005 Saint george Peirson
Circulated by Article Emporium
| |
