Search engines have a bias for text.  If you are in a competitive field and are up against many other companies online for the same keywords, your web site’s pages needs to have keyword-rich text.   Images, Flash animation, and PDF files won’t cut it.

Images, Flash Files, & PDF Files

Images, Flash animation, and PDF files are not easily readable by the search engines and do not help your search engine optimization efforts.  They can be very useful elements for humans. However, when trying to get your web site’s pages indexed with the search engines, the content that matters most is text.  If you want the text to be indexed and rank well, it should not be embedded in images, PDFs or Flash files.

Frames, iframes, and Pop-ups

Files within frames, iframes, and pop-ups are indexed as separate files and can end up being orphaned and show-up in search results without the web site’s header, navigation, or footer, which can cause confusion and result in missed opportunities and sales.  It’s best to avoid frames, iframes, and pop-ups and exclude them from the pages you wish to have indexed by the search engines.  You can do this by putting these types of files in a directory (such as “popups” and “iframes”),  and then adding a rule to your robots.txt file (usually found in the root folder of your website) that tells to search engines to ignore these directories.

Here’s an example of what to add to the robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /popups/
Disallow: /iframes/

It’s All About Keywords

The search engines need readable text.  But not just any old text.  The text on each web page must be properly formatted and focused on keywords.

There are many opportunities to optimize a web page for specific keywords.  Here are a few:

• Keywords in heading tags (H1 tags for primary headings, H2 & H3 tags for lower level headings)
• Keywords in the body text (especially within the first paragraph).  Don’t worry too much about keyword density.  Just make sure it sounds normal and you won’t have to be too concerned about over doing it.
• Stress the keywords – include them in a bulleted list, bold face and italicize them.
• Use the keywords in the images’ alt tags on the page.
• Use keywords in url links to other pages within your site.

Try to use the web page’s keyword 15 times on a page.  Make sure it flows normally.  Don’t “stuff” keywords or the search engines may ban your pages.

For example, an image alt tag that looks like this is okay:

<img alt=”running shoes” src=”http://www.nike.com/athletic-shoe-iages/running-shoes.jpg”>

Stuffing a number of keywords into the alt tag, on the other hand, is not okay:

<img alt=” running shoes, best running shoes, discount running shoes, running shoes, choosing running shoes, running shoes reviews, running shoes ratings” src=”http://www.nike.com/athletic-shoe-iages/running-shoes.jpg”>

When building search engine optimized page content for your web site, remember: it’s all about keywords.