subject: SEO for Beginners: Sculpting Your Content for Search Engines [print this page] SEO for Beginners: Sculpting Your Content for Search Engines
In the first two articles, we looked at some of the basic technical concerns behind creating a search-engine-friendly Web page and finding the right keywords on which to focus. But I emphasized one rule in both of those posts as the key to successful pages: being true to the content your audience wants to find.
The whole point of your Web enterprise -- be it an e-commerce venture or a blog about your favorite movies -- is to find an interested audience. Naturally, that depends on your providing it with a steady diet of what it wants.
Search engines have a complementary interest: their business depends on helping users find the content they're after on sites like yours. So, those companies design their algorithms to determine as effectively as possible which sites actually provide the content they appear to offer.
Sounds simple: you create the content people want and search engines will help people to find it. The fly in the ointment comes in the form of the technical limitations of those search engines and the spiders with which they crawl Web content.
As long as your content is simple HTML text, everything is quite simple. But your primary goal is to appeal to your audience -- not a search bot -- and that probably means making a site that looks and behaves in ways that are appealing, engaging, even surprising or delightful. So, you'll rely on images for some of your text or navigation, as well as for illustration. You may also use rich media elements built in Flash, the proprietary format developed by Macromedia (and now owned by Adobe, the people who make Photoshop).
Search engines -- particularly Google -- are making significant efforts to find ways to recognize and catalog non-text content on Web sites. But, for the time being, their success has been modest. And that leaves us with finding ways to balance our need for a sophisticated and engaging presentation against our interest in making our content available to search engines.
We discussed in our first post the importance of naming your image files (or other kinds of supplemental content elements) so as to indicate to a search algorithm how focused all of your content is on a particular subject or keyword. For example, illustration and graphic header images could use the name "Washington" on a page devoted to the first president of the U.S. But audio files (.wav, .mp3, .m4a), .swf (Flash movie) files, or other movie files (.mov, .wmv) should also reflect the keywords you've chosen.
While it starts to get us into more sophisticated Web page creation, there are other ways to achieve some of the rich-media effects you may be after without choosing an impenetrable format like Flash. DHTML (or "Dynamic HTML") using a combination of standard HTML coding and javascript to create sophisticated interactive experiences, while leaving the individual elements available to search engines.
In addition, pages can be coded so as to serve Flash content up only to those browsers or computers that have the necessary plug-in installed. For browsers without the necessary plug-in, those same pages can serve up more simple -- and more search-engine-friendly -- content elements. This, too, gets into some more complicated page coding. But, if you have any experience with Adobe Dreamweaver, you may find the matter within the bounds of your capabilities, as I did in the following page examples.
Choose any of the following pages linked to here, and look at the source code:
Carlos Garavito
Aaron Starkman
Jack Neary
You'll see that each page offers up both an animated .swf header, along with an alternative .gif header. (To keep the experience comparable, I've created .gif headers that also employ a simple animation technique.)
The advantage is that most visitors get the smooth Flash animation I intended by loading the .swf file automatically. Only the rare visitor without the Flash plug-in (or someone visiting via an Apple iPhone) will load the alternate .gif files. But, most importantly, those search engines' crawlers will find references to both .gif and .swf files named to correspond to my chosen keywords.
So what's the lesson here? As before, be true to your audience and the content you want to provide to them and believe they want to find. But Web page creation -- like the rest of life -- is full of accommodation and compromises. Here, that means only being aware of the advantages or drawbacks to the formats you choose for your content, as well as technical opportunities you may have to smooth over any conflicts your preferred choice may offer an earnest (but necessarily limited) search engine crawler.
