What Google looks for vs ignores in your website
Search engines see websites differently than we, as actual humans do. Search engines send small programs called ‘bots’ or ’spiders’ to crawl every webpage out there and send them all information about new or updated sites. This is no small task. Therefore the programs must be very small and primitive in order to collect all the data. Here’s a quick sample of what the search engines ’see’ that we might not a vice-versa.
Search Engines Like:
New Data – whoever has the latest information on ‘celeb xyz’ or ‘product abc’ will be given more search credit than a site which was updated last month or last year.
Pages/Content – if you have a one page overview of earplugs, and your competitor has 16 different pages about each type of earplug, how they protect from different types of noise, and a video demo of how to install earplugs correctly… They are going to come across as a much more credible source of information.
Links - you want to be considered a master in your field, or the main source of information about a specific product or service. If people link to you as ‘this guy really knows his stuff about flooring’ or ‘rad marketing gal’ – it increases your credit as a credible website. This above all else will increase your organic search ranking. Sadly, there is no quick and easy way to do this… It takes time and work. Making sure you are listing in all proper directories is a good start, and best of all mostly free.
What Search Engines Don’t See (or care about)
Color/Look – bots scan text and they are blind. They can’t tell if you have white text on a white background which looks invisible to a human eye, to them, it’s content (this is how many websites get into trouble by using underhanded ‘blackhat’ techniques to increase traffic). Your site might be the prettiest thing ever, but if it’s totally done in flash, google can’t see most of it.
Pictures – because bots are blind, pictures look like large holes in your website, unless you have the correct ‘alt tags’ behind those pictures (pic 2343 is not a good alt tag, it doesn’t explain what the photo is… ‘Nikon Deluxe Camera Bag w/ leather strap, Black’ is a good alt text, because it describes the image ) Make sure your images are correctly describing the image, because if your camera image has an alt tag of ‘free beer!!! PORN PORN PORN’ you are probably going to get blacklisted – and dropped to the bottom of the search ocean.
Fonts Size/Headings - Unless you have your headings in the correct format (H1 tags) bots do not differentiate between sizes and fonts. It all looks like the same content-wise. This is why something that looks to the human eye like a newspaper, looks more like a thesis paper to a search engine.
Hope this helps explain a few of the aspects that will guide you in making your website properly visible to the search engines.
