in Black and White | SEO Secrets & Insider Tricks

Formatting Your Site

We have seen that the words on the pages of your website are what the search engine spider is hungry for. That means that if your site is one of those fancy Flash based showcase sites then you are pretty much out of luck when it comes to your site being looked at favourably by search engines. Things are slowly improving for Flash enthusiasts, but HTML is still unequivocally the best option for a search engine friendly site.

For the same reason it is important to be aware that Search Engine Spiders will not read JavaScript – so be careful if you have a navigation system that depends on it. If your pages do feature a JavaScript menu system then you should provide an alternative text based menu at the foot of each page for the spiders to follow.

While considering the format of your site it is also worth mentioning that lean and clean code is the way to go. Small file sizes with no extraneous junk markup is the order of the day. Good old (X)HTML coding with plenty of relevant text on each page wins hands down when it comes to pleasing those inquisitive search engine bots. And to be really pedantic it is also worthwhile making sure that your pages validate.