Search Engine Friendly Design and Development

Usability of Your Website

SEOmoz Beginners Guide to SEO Ch4 Review Part 1 is of the most important reviews of the guide and it will take a few videos to cover the material in the fourth chapter.

You learn what indexing is all about. That is you see what search engines need in order to be able to index your content to their database.

You have to know what search engines can see and what they cannot see.

There are certain types of code and information that search engines cannot see. Videos, audio, images are all examples of content that search engines cannot “see”.

For them to figure out what is behind a video, audio file or image, they need a transcript in the case of the video and audio, or they need to have an “alt” tag describing what an image is about.

You will see examples of what a site looks like to humans and what it looks like to search engines to highlight these points.

So take in the video. It is the first of four covering this chapter. And learn some pretty important concepts that will help you succeed online.

As always, please “tweet”. “like” , “Google +1″”Pin” if you find the information helpful. This will get the word out to folks who may need this to get them going.

Many thanks for your support.

For those who want text, read on there is a transcript of the video.

Hey, Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line, welcome. This is going

to be the continuation of the series on the SEOmoz Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

This is about chapter four. It looks like chapter four is one of the more

important chapters, in my mind. A lot of interesting information and very

important concepts in here, and it’s going to take maybe two or three

videos to pay this chapter tribute.

 

So what is it about? It’s about the basics of search engine friendly design

and development. It’s about usability. How easy is your web page or website

to use. It talks about certain technical aspects of building web pages so

that they’re structured for both search engines and human visitors. This is

the kind of stuff you need to know a lot about.

 

The first thing is indexable content. What this means is when a search

engine comes and crawls your page, how does it pick up the information so

that it can put those keywords into its index and have them ready to serve

up when somebody types in a query. Well, the thing is, you have to know

what’s indexable; what the search engines can read and put into the index,

and what they can’t. That’s what this indexable content section is about.

 

It talks about images, flash files, java applets, and other things like

search boxes, and video and audio. These are all the type of information

that cannot be indexed easily. Here you learn that images in the .gif,

.jpg, and .png format need to have alt attributes. You need to have an alt

tag that explains what that image is about. In other words, you have to put

all of that stuff in HTML text in one way or another. Search boxes have to

be supplemented with either navigation or crawlable links, have a link

attached to what the search box is about.

 

That link can be configured to explain to the search engine, what that

search box is about. Flash and Java plugins contain content that can be

supplemented with text on the page. Search engines don’t like Flash or Java

plugins. They can read Java script, I was corrected on one video. Video and

audio should have transcripts, so that way it will get the text it needs in

order to understand what they are.

 

Seeing like a search engine, they give you a couple of tools, SEO Browser

and MozBar, which will allow you to see what your cache looks like. Here’s

a sample. Here’s what the page looks like to a human, and this is what a

search engine sees when it has it in the cached text form. Here’s another

search page that has a lot of Flash in it. It looks great to the human, but

over here on the right hand side, you can see that with the search engine,

it doesn’t see anything and can’t index anything. That’s what this first

part of this chapter is about.

 

If I were to demonstrate, let me do that. For example, if you want to see

what a cached site looks like, you type in the command ‘cache:’. Let’s go

take a look at my website. This is what my website looks like. This is a

cached version, this is what the search engine sees in a snapshot of this

page as it appeared on this particular day. The current page could be

different, because it hasn’t been crawled. That’s what the cached version

looks like, it looks pretty much like the real page. A text only version in

the cache looks like this.

 

That’s what it means when it talks about indexing and looking at

information. Here you can see that it could read all this text, and if it’s

tagged properly on these pages, index this material and put it properly

into an index so that it would be useful for a search. That’s what it means

about indexable content and caching.

 

In the next video we’re going to talk about crawlable link structures. How

do the rest of the pages of your website, or how are they found, and

they’re found with the search engines following links. That’s it, so this

is part one of chapter four. This is Claude Pelanne, Affiliate Starting

Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk to you soon.