Continued from page 1
I've seen many reports from different sites that used (notice
past tense) Flash Intro pages. Hardly surprising is fact that on average, a whopping 20%-30% of visitors left site after accessing ONLY homepage (where splash page or flash intro was).
The second reason to stay away from these is that it has a huge affect on search engines. Search engines can only index text, a huge graphic or flash intro doesn't give engines anything to index. As a result homepage, which is often highest ranking page on a site, has almost no chance of ranking well at all. In addition, depending on how links from graphic or flash to internal pages are coded, engines may not be able to follow links to rest of pages on site which means your site will not get spidered properly.
To summarize, stay away from splash pages and flash intro's. Give visitor some actual text to read and engines something to index. Your visitor retention will go up, and so will your search engine traffic.
*Hyperlinks*
Hyperlinks are your bread and butter when dealing with search engines. They are way in which search engines find all of pages on your site and index them. If a search engine can't follow a hyperlink, it won't be able to index destination page, meaning parts of your site may become invisible to engines.
Be sure to use only true hyperlinks in your site. I've seen many sites that use some javascript links instead of actual hyperlinks. While these will work for most browsers (about 90%), they don't give engines anything to follow.
A true hyperlink should say:
href="URL of page here.html" rel="nofollow"
Any other type of link is most likely not going to be followed properly.
*Body Text*
As I mentioned before, engines can only index text. Too often I see sites that use graphic representations of text or a large graphic that has some of their most important text within it. Do whatever you can to stay away from this. If your most important words are in graphic format, you have taken away thing that engines need most to properly index and rank your site.
Engines also want to see continuity in structure of a page. When a webmaster uses lots of tables, frames, and other design elements, it breaks up flow of text on page, and can have a negative effect on your rankings.
Whenever possible, use as few tables as possible. When you do use tables, do your best to not break up a paragraph or sentence into separate cells in a table, this destroys flow of text and causes words to be seen as unrelated fragments instead of part of same continuous sentence/paragraph.
It is important to realize that engines do not see pages same way a visitor does. While visitor sees page displayed properly with all of next flowing nicely, an engine sees only HTML code behind page that breaks up flow of text.
In general, simpler page and HTML behind it, better ranking will be.
*Summary*
Always be sure to be aware of impact that a particular design element will have on both your visitors and ability of engines to properly index your site.
By understanding how engines work, what they look for, what they can and can't do, you will vastly increase your chances of successfully achieving rankings needed to make your business a success.
John Buchanan is the author of the book "The Insider's Guide to Dominating The Search Engines", and publisher of "The Search Engine Bulletin", a FREE monthly newsletter. Visit him at http://www.se-secrets.com for more information or to sign up for the newsletter.
