ANY WEBSITE MUST be built for two different sets of eyes — the eyes of the people who see it and the "eyes" of the search engine spiders that visit your site, catalog its key words and rank it according to their own formula. Among the biggest mistakes you can make is to buy a web design based entirely on looks. It's entirely possible to spend a great deal of money on a site that looks great to human beings but is invisible to search engines. If the spiders can't find your information, the search engines will never know you exist. Worse, you'll never get a single referral from Google or Yahoo or MSN.
See the banner at the top of this page? The one that says "PLYWOOD MEDIA" with the O's overlapping? Search engine spiders cannot read those words. Those words, which appear so "obvious", are locked up in an image — a picture. And to a search engine spider, all images are just a jumble of meaningless code. On the other hand, what you are reading right now is "visible text." It can be scanned by a search engine for content and key words. Within the internet's hierarchy of information, it can be analyzed, ranked, and possibly matched up with someone's search query.
Make sure your website can be "spidered" by the search engines, and make sure there is plenty of visible text. If your home page is one great big picture, visitors will be able to find it if they already know the URL, but search engines won't find it and they won't be able to send any traffic your way.
Images are not the only things on the internet that "lock up" information and make it inaccessible to search engines. JavaScript and Flash are among the information technologies that have a lot of appeal to the human eye but essentially keep out search engine spiders. Links from your website to others, an important element in mapping the web, are invisible to search engines when they are locked up in those pretty JavaScript buttons or dazzling Flash animations. There's nothing wrong with JavaScript or Flash. There's nothing wrong with photographs. Any of these elements can be an important part of your sales message. But if they are 100% of your website, well, you'll be missing out on the big secret.
