The first thing to consider is that search engines do not see pictures or other graphics. If you have rendered some very important text (loaded with keywords) as an image, a beautiful multi-colored gif for example, search engine will not index these keywords. There are some wizard-oriented web creation tools that may automatically change your text into a gif or jpg image. It may look like text to you, but not to a search engine. Thus, you have to weigh relative importance of good images against need to give search engine something to chew on, some "spider food". Usually a balance has to be struck. At one extreme are pages that contain only images. For example if you have an entry page with a beautiful image of ocean and a beautiful sunset with one word saying Enter. It may be dramatic looking, but it is not very interesting for a search engine. Similarly sites that are only Flash images, don't give anything for search engine's "spider" (robotic gathering tool) to gobble up and put into index. If you want to use Flash, consider making a hybrid page, one that has some elements, such as informative text, of normal HTML and a section in Flash. Keep this in mind and make sure that your important concepts and keywords do appear on your pages in a text format.

However as pictures and graphics are very important, there is something that can be done to optimize them for search engine recognition. You can put an alt tag or alternative text on each image. The search engines will read this text and index words you have entered. Thus if you have your company's logo at top of page Acme Widgets, you can write and alternative text: "Acme Widgets, California's first producer of Electronic Widgets". Put your mouse over A1-Optimization logo at top of this page and you can see alt text which I used for this image. Search engines will see this tag and tag will also appear when your web visitors put their mouse on image. Whenever you have an image, take opportunity to put an alternative text tag. But remember that, although alternative text tag is indeed indexed by search engines, it is not given as much importance as other text elements.

Search Engines use a number of criteria to decide what a given web page is all about. These criteria, which can be different from Search Engine to Search Engine, and which may even change over time, all aim at deciding how "relevant" a page is to a given user's search. The Search Engine wants to return results most relevant to a user's search.

While particulars may change over time, there are some criteria which remain constant. One of these is where keywords are located on page. Typically words that are located closer to beginning of a page are considered more important than words that occur further down page. This stands to reason: think of a newspaper article, where headline and first paragraph usually have more "meat" than rest of story.

Another measure of relevance is "keyword density". This is roughly ratio of keywords on a page to total number of words on a page. Having a higher ratio of keywords to total words will make a page more relevant for a search on those keywords.

When a Search Engine sends its robot out to look at your page, you want to make sure that it finds important information near top of web page, and that page has a high keyword density. Sometimes there are complications, even when you have a lot of keyword-rich text early in visible portion of your page. Two of these complications, extensive JavaScript code and extensive Cascading Style Sheet code, can be easily remedied.

JavaScript problem

Large amounts of JavaScript code can get in way. Typically largest amount of JavaScript code in a web page is found in HEAD section. This is usually where variables and functions are defined, and so forth.

Unfortunately, having a large amount of JavaScript code in a page can be detrimental to a page's ranking in Search Engines.

Since Search Engines tend to pay more attention to text at beginning of a web page than they do to text further from beginning, it stands to reason that if you have several dozen lines of JavaScript code at top of page, your real content is going to be further from beginning of page. Further down page means less important to Search Engine.

Keyword density is also important. Here again, if you have several hundred words of JavaScript code in a page, keyword density—the ratio of your keywords to all words in whole page, both text and code—is going to be much lower. That means that some Search Engines will decide that your page is less relevant.

JavaScript solution

So how do you maintain JavaScript functionality, but make your page as Search Engine-friendly as possible? You put JavaScript code into a separate file, and link it back to web page.

The original page, "mypage.html", may look something like this.