By : Admin

After creating a wonderful website by hiring an expensive web designer, many webmasters spends sleepless nights. Reason? Their web site is not showing up in the search engines like Google, MSN or Yahoo! They think for hours, what has gone wrong after putting in so lot of time, money and efforts? The answer is spiders are having difficulty in “crawling” or reading the website. But what these spiders are? Spiders are the automated robots or “bots” that crawl the web looking for new and updated webpages. They sometimes find problem crawling a website and there are many possible factors that lead to this problem. Some of them are mentioned below.

Flash: Flash is a technology that designers and programmers use to add animation and sound to a site. When used properly, it adds excitement and energy to a site. Many people consider static, text-heavy sites boring, and with today’s high-speed connections, they expect sites to have a bit of flair to them.

However, the problem is when an entire site is built using one large Flash file. Spiders can’t read the text embedded in the Flash file making it difficult for the site to rank well in search engines. Flash sites also lack individual pages that can be optimized.

Graphic Files: Spiders crawl your site’s HTML source code looking for text. For your site to be indexed and ranked by the search engines, the spider has to find and read the page copy in the HTML source code. Spiders can’t read words embedded in common graphic files, such as GIFs or JPEGs. If your site’s homepage is one large graphic file, you’re blocking the spider from reading the copy your visitors see. Your site will show up for your company name but not much else.

Homepage is a form: If you require site visitors to choose an item from a drop down menu, for example, they have to choose a country or language before entering your site; you’re effectively stopping spiders cold. Why? Spiders can’t manipulate drop-down menus. A good work-around is to include static text links on your page as well. Because spiders can read text links, including them will help the spider find the subpages of your site.

Homepage is a splash page: Splash pages are fancy animated intros and are problematic for spiders and for people. Most splash pages contain a redirect after the Flash animation is complete. All search engines consider redirects to be spam. Also, many site visitors don’t like sitting through the music and visuals of Flash intros either because they waste time. Instead, they’ll click right back out!

Text: Not having text on a page is a problem for two reasons: One, the spider has nothing to read and index, and two, your prospects and customers have no idea what you’re offering. Simply put, no text means lower search engine rankings, conversions, and sales. Consider including 100-300 words of keyword-rich, text-based copy on each page of your site.

To conclude, make your website as spider friendly as possible. Building a spider-friendly site is crucial to search engine visibility. Ensure that your home page and subpages have text-based copy, don’t rely only on drop-down menus, and limit the use of Flash in order to acquire a high ranking and indexing with major search engines.

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