Increasing Website Traffic - Texting for Spiders

Tip 9: Texting Rules

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Google loves text! Add lots of text for a big SEO impact

People do this all the time - they create a page that has lots of Flash, Java, and graphics. The header is a graphic. The links are graphics. There is a video flash player to 'talk' to the visitor. But the page ranks very poorly in the search results.

Why? Because Google has no idea what the page is about! Google knows how to scan text best of all. You need to have a decent amount of plain text on every page. I know what you're probably thinking - graphics look cooler than plain text. Perhaps they do. But facts are facts. Google cannot 'read' graphics because they don't contain any text. Google can't watch

your Flash video to see what keywords to target. And Google struggles with Java.

Yes, graphics and Java and Flash are fine for entertaining visitors, assuming your key business purpose is to entertain them. Add a few hundred words of text, be sure it includes the name of your company, keywords, and all of the important things the search engine needs to know. The result? Google will love it because you've made your site easy to classify and rank accurately.

Example:

Imagine I own a company giving information on how to become an airplane pilot. I've had my website layout professionally designed. It has graphical buttons for all of the links, a cool header and excellent Web 2.0 graphics all around. And in the middle of homepage a flash video starts playing that shows visitors the joys of piloting an airplane. But, there are no words on the page at all.

Sure, my visitors will 'get it'. They'll will be able to read the graphical logos and the video will tell them everything they need to know. They'll love it.

But will they be able to find my site? Probably not. Google won't have a clue what's on it. There are no keywords for Google to find and classify. There are no articles to scan. In the eyes of a Google spider, there's nothin' there.

Note: In the future, Google will make progress in this area. There are already rumors circulating that Google can spider some Flash content. Perhaps OCR-like additions will help them to read some graphics in the future. But realistically, text is still the most important part of optimizing your page at this time.

Increasing Traffic - Add Tons of Text