You can always recognize the face. It’s always the same. It’s the expression our prospective clients get when they find out their website design is invisible.
Not to you and I, of course, but to the search engines. Yes, some website designs are completely invisible to those internet-crawling robots.
Here are the three most common causes of an invisible website.
1. Flash Programming - The search engines have a lot of trouble crawling and indexing (getting the main point or topic) flash programming. If the words or text are in flash, it can’t read them. If the navigation is in flash, it compounds the problem.
2. Over-Used Company Name - The site is inadvertently optimized around a term that consumers don’t use. We see a lot of sites where the company name is the most common two or three word phrase and is the phrase used in the headlines and the page title and the page description. When you do that on each and every page on the site, it’s hard for the search engines to think your site is about anything else. Since new customers rarely search by a specific business name, the website becomes invisible for search queries that really matter.
3. Little to No Content – Yes, meta tags and page titles are important, but if you had to be successful at one thing on your website, be successful at content. We see a lot of websites that really simply have no content. They have lots of pictures and big buttons (usually really big buttons), but no real words that describe something that a consumer may be looking for.
People always ask us, if flash programming makes it so difficult for search engines to index a website design, why do so many websites use it?
The answer is that it makes website designs easier to sell. It is much easier to sell a prospective client attractive and sleek animation than it is to sell through a website design that is grounded in SEO principles and usability practices.
As our industry matures and clients become more educated about what makes a successful website design and what does not, this practice will change. Soon businesses will look at their website the same way they look at any marketing program and begin to measure its effectiveness solely by the return on investment it brings.
Until then, many businesses will miss the customers that look right through their invisible website design only to find their competitors’ websites.