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You are here: Home > Articles > SEO
Search Engine Optimization - Getting Noticed Online: What to avoid.
Using Flash, Javascript and lots of Graphics on Your Website
First off, we're not anti flash or Javascript. But for websites that sell products and want to attract the most visitors we think it's best to avoid flash, Javascript and too much information within graphics.
What's the deal with multimedia?
Multimedia is not indexed by the search engines, if you want your text to be indexed by the search engines and be found when an internet user does a websearch, keep your text as text.
How does a webcrawler work?
Most web crawlers are pretty simple, they hit the first page of your website and look for links to other pages, all along they record the HTML text in a database for keyword searching.
Javascript is ignored, and so is Flash or text within images. Keep in mind that if your links are handled by Javascript, the search engine will not find the link and crawl that page. A better way to use JavaScript in links and do link tracking.
Stick with plain old HTML where you can, if you have to use more advanced content, make sure you have a link to a site map with links to all the pages on your site to help the web crawlers out.
Internet Archives and Search Engine Caches
If you're selling something, do you want all the web hits to be on your site, or do you want users to look at a 6 month old copy of your website and not even know they are interested in your products?
Of course you want all the potential customers to actually hit your website to get your most up to data content.
Internet Archive
The Internet Archive is the biggest of the web archives, for most websites it's great way to get a historical view of past content, for sales sites your users may visit it instead of your own site.
To opt out of the Archive, just add the following to your robots.txt file at your server's document root directory:
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /
For my site, I don't mind providing the first index page and like to exclude the content pages (in the html directory) with pricing or product info:
User-agent: ia_archiver Disallow: /html/ Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Search Engine Caches
Google and many other sites will now show a "Cache" link in search results for your website. This allows users to view and out-of-date snapshot of your website, again not so good for sales sites.
To disable all search engines from keeping a cache of your website (this does not affect your search results at all) add the following to every HTML page:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
Google Image Search
The google image search, while a great way to locate images, is also a prime way to have your images copied without your consent.
To stop the Google Image spider from crawling your site, add the following to the robots.txt file at your server's document root directory:
User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /