The developers have worked very hard to make your Sitebuilder Web site search engine friendly, however, there are things that you can do to thwart all of those efforts.
These are the top ways to make your Site search engine Unfriendly.
- One of the worst things you can do is setup an intro screen or a “splash” page before you get to your main content. Many times this is Flash that has no readable content for the search engines to pickup. Your home page is the most relevant page to the search engines, do not waste it on a splash page. If that’s not enough reason, consider this. People want their content fast. Believe me, no one want to sit through an intro page.
- Using I-Frames. Do not place content in I-Frames. The search engines do not recognize this as on page content and will not index it.
- Using images instead of written text on your pages. Search engines cannot index text that is in an image. Make sure you do not overuse images where you could use written text that the search engine can index.
- Slow page load times. Google is starting to look at page load times. Heavy pages may be penalized. Therefore, you need to keep the page loading fast as possible. If you need to put images on the page make sure they are optimized locally (on your local machine before uploading).
A JPG should always be compressed. For instance, using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements a 1.3 meg photo can be compresses down to 60k without losing definition. The quality setting should be set at 60 when compressing JPG images. All good image editing software will have a similar feature. A good image editing program is a must!
