SEO: Should You Care About Search Engine Optimization?

Search Engine Optimization, better known as SEO is a technique or a process to optimize or tune a website for better search engine visibility. Why should you bother to optimize your website? you might ask. Read on…

All major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! visit your site, read the content and then analyze it for listing in their engines. This method of search engine visiting your website and reading through your content is called crawling and a robot (pre-programmed tool) is used to capture content (crawling). Keep in mind that not all websites that gets crawled are indexed and listed in search engines.

Imagine these crawling robots as a text browser which can not display images, flash objects. Just simple plain text! So, when one of these robots will crawl through your website, it will only be able to read the content available in the form of text. They can parse through HTML tags and understand the difference between a header and a paragraph but can not read words embedded inside an image or a flash object. You should therefore be adopting a way to put as much as content as possible in text format for these robots to read. This is also known as search engine visibility.

Let’s go through case study of a website called “Murphy’s Garage” for better understanding of search engine visibility and see the drawbacks of techniques adopted by this website design.

Murphy’s Garage is a decade old service station for cars. They specialize in repair and servicing of many branded cars and are doing well. To keep up with the Internet age, they decide to open a website and showcase their offerings online. To do this, they hire a website designer and provide him with their requirements. After a month or so, the website designer is ready with the design of their upcoming website. Some notable aspects of the website:

• All the navigations links on the site are nice looking flash buttons
• The site looks very nice and catchy with loads of graphics
• A nice looking font is used for the content and all content is in the form of images

It’s not too hard to imagine the consequences of designing the site in this way. The robots can not read through the buttons which we know by now, and it means that the robots will not be able to crawl through any other page than the main page. Not only that, the robots will also not be able to read any of the content since the designer has put all the content in images. Bottom line, the chances of this website getting listed in search engine is rare since almost nothing could be read by the robots.

Remember, content which is not read by robots will not be indexed. Period!

I hope you are understanding the importance of optimizing your website for better search engine visibility. In an another post, I will be focusing on search engine guidelines and simple SEO techniques that you can implement on your own before you consult SEO companies.