Graphics and Flash why they are bad ideas for SEO
| Last time we covered how the distributions, the appearance, the style of keywords within your website document affect the rankings, this time, we would look at issue how graphical representations element can affect your search engine ranking and also the work around to those issues.When designing a website, one may think a good appearance such as a whole page flash movie opening may impress their readers or visitors and hence may help |
them drive more traffic and thus convert sales. However, according to studies, this is often not such a case. The reasons are if your site got whole lot of graphics or flash movies, it takes longer to load. In this fast world, if your site loads very very slow under test on a 56K modem, most people will just click the the little “cross” on the top on their browsers and go! Therefore, you should test how fast your websites loads under a 56 K modem before attempting any seo strategies since finally you want visitor not engines robots or software that come along.
But what about search engines, how do they ‘think’ about graphics or flash? They often see a flash movie or graphics are junks. The reason is search engine robot or spider (a piece of software that written by search engine companies and helps them to gather information about websites) can not understand what graphics or flash is all about, they just interest on words, or text and that’s it.
So, if you put too much graphics or flash there, it is much harder for any search engine to find your site is related
to certain search queries.
Search engine friendly design
But do you mean we have to design our sites ugly just for search engines purposes?
No, I don’t mean that but design your page which as user and search engine friendly as possible. For example,
1.) don’t use a whole page flash you can still use flash but don’t do it on the whole page.
The best way to do it I think (and in fact many SEO companies are doing) a flash banner put in on your page’s header
and that’s it.
2.) for graphics site, use the ‘ALT’ tag whenever possible. what is an ‘alt’ tag
It helps search engines and vision impaired persons to figure out what this picture is all about. In other words it provides text description of the pictures or graphics. This matches what I have said at the beginning, “search engine spider loves text.” The more text you gave it, the more information the spider will know about your site, then eventually helps your site overall ranking.
ALT img tag
ok now what an ALT tag looks like?
Let’s look at an example searchenginecollege.com,
if you use your mouse points to the first picture, it will read “a happy sec graduate”
and if you look at the source for the picture it will be
<img border=”1″ src=….. alt=”a happy SEC graduate” …> that how it can be inserted to your website. of course you need some basic understanding of how to write a webpage. you can learn more by going webmonkey.com.
Now what text you should insert when coming across the ‘alt’ tag?
the best result is to use your keywords, but don’t over use it.
mix them up so you won’t be penalized by search engines from keyword stuffing (i.e. over use your keywords)
e.g. agogdigital.com a local seo consultant in hongkong, if you point the mouse to the picture under heading search engine optimization servcies on internet explorer, it reads, “search engine optimization service and positioning website on Google, Yahoo…”. Back to our last week article remeber the title tag is the most important element when
search engine ranks a site, that is, for agogdigtal, the keywords will be “seo”, search engine optimization, search engine marketing. on the site home page, right. So for your alt tags, insert your keywords whenever possible.
Does it make sense? I hope you are staying with me.
For this site, they use a flash header banner, so you can reference that when designing your flash element.
OK, next time we will talk about how important does google or search engines
look at when others website on the internet linking your site affect your website positioning.
thanks for reading.
