Author Archives: Maria Johnsen

A lot of people may have heard of the expression textual content . What does it indicate? It defines letters, words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs that can be “read” by a search engine’s robot program called a “spider.” It is the search engine’s spider that “reads” your Websites. If the spider cannot see something, it won’t exist as far as the search engine is concerned. Search engine readable text might not be noticeable to you, nevertheless it is visible to search engines if the text is included as part of the Web page’s underlying code. Search engine spiders do not “see” what you see when viewing a Web site. You may see pretty pictures, graphics, text, movies, and animations. The spider may see – not anything at least nothing that it can search and index. Search engines view the special code behind the Website, not what is displayed in your browser window. To see what a search engine sees, display your favorite Website. Then, with your mouse, perform a “right click” on the Web site page to pop up a menu. If you are using Internet Explorer, look for “View Source” on the menu and click on it (If you don’t see “View Source” as one of the options in the menu, then click again on another part of the Website. Stay away from menus, flash movies, graphics, photos and the like.) The resulting window displays what the search engine sees, which, of course, looks like a bunch of code to you and me. The finest way to ensure that textual content is usable by search engines is to focus on the effective use of key phrases or key phrases within well-written text. The use of keywords and phrases on a page should be natural but purposeful, not forced or overdone. Your Web page should not resort to “tricks” to put key phrases in the Web page’s search engine readable text. Here are some guaranteed ways to get penalized, banned or ignored by search engines: keyword stuffing: On some Websites you will see some words or phrases are repeated over and over and over, assuming that this will force a search engine into giving the keyword a higher value. Some use imperceptible key terms which are hidden only to you, not to the search engine. Web page creators can make words invisible by simply making them the same color as the background. If the underlying code for a Web page contains invisible key phrases, it will be penalized, or even banned, by search engines. Using tiny fonts can hurt your ranking. Some other people use meta tags that are not related to their niche. They write these words because they have higher ranking and visitors. Some other people use graphical keywords and phrases are words contained within a graphic, photograph or Flash movie. They may look good to you, but search engines take no notice of them While “content is king” when it comes to search engine optimization, Web site builders can employ other techniques to improve search engine listings. Google enables you to create a special Sitemap that is particular to Google robots. The Sitemap file requires a specific Google format to work, and forces Google to spider all the Pages contained in the Sitemap.xml file. For this to work, Google also requires a validation file to be created. Make this file and place it in your Web page’s root directory. Some search engines use an info.txt file that contains specially formatted information about the Web page, including the site URL, site name and descriptive text. Continue reading →