by Vern Clinton

Your key to search engine optimization:

The “invisible” website is  the “back end” or “source code.

” This is what search engines see.  If a website is to be Optimized for relevant search phrases then the invisible becomes extremely important.  A site that is ideal to human visitors may be virtually invisible or incomprehensible to search engine “robots” (the programs that visit your site and gather information for their indexed databases)

Search engine robots don’t see and don’t care about:

• Pictures
• Movies
• Sound bytes
• Text in graphics (like fancy drop shadow slogans)
• Javascripts that are used in fancy navigation, pop-ups, and animations)
• Formatting code that is not standards compliant or that is superfluous. This can stop a robot cold causing them to go away without indexing the most important parts of the page

Search engine robots do see and evaluate:

• Text that is relevant to the site and to the search phrases you want indexed.
• Meta Tags
• Title tags–very important (What you see as a title when you use a search engine and get a list of links)
• Description Tags. (Not important to the robot, but important to a searcher as this is what describes the link to the site and causes a searcher to choose your link over the ones above and below you)
• Keyword Tags. (These are seldom used by search engines and are a carry-over from years ago, however, they traditionally contain the keywords you are interested in having indexed well)
• robots.txt file (this is a text file that robots use (if present) to guide them to the pages you want indexed. it also tells them which pages you do not want indexed.) Since it saves the robot’s time, a well designed robots.txt file will result in more pages being more thoroughly indexed.
• XML sitemap file. This is a special file that a knowledgeable web master submits to search engines that suggests to them which pages are most important and how often to crawl them for changing content.

Once the invisible website is adquate on these points search engine optimization can begin.