5 Difficult Technologies or Techniques for SEOs

Last week our CEO Ross Dunn wrote about the iRobot. When searching for "iRobot" I was unable to find the site. It wasn't until I typed "iRobot Movie" that a listing came up directing me to the correct site. This happened because the site is designed using FLASH from front to finish. In order to correct this issue, a new website incorporating standard HTML with a FLASH movie embedded in the HTML page (Frames are used by webmasters to split a page into two or more active areas. Often used to provide elements that remain static regardless of where the visitor moves in the site, Frames present a basic problem for search engine spiders due to the way a frame-set is written into the source-code. When you view a page designed using Frames, you are actually viewing three or more distinct files that are compiled together to make what appears to be one page. The first file is the frame-set or the foundation. The frame-set then calls two or more files that appear next to each other on the page creating what looks like a single page. When a search engine spider moves through the source-code of the page, it only sees the file names but does not actually see the files or their contents themselves. There are work-around's for sites designed using Frames such as the <noframes> tag, however these solutions are never as powerful as a properly designed HTML page could be. Shopping Carts are used to enable E-Commerce and are obviously necessary to allow for purchasing of products directly from a website. As the vast majority of our clients are from commercial sectors, we see dozens of different shopping carts each month. Most carts are not search engine friendly. Using long data strings to direct traffic, or non-descriptive file names, individual products displayed in most carts will not achieve search engine placements without serious manipulation or mapping on the part of a good SEO. One shopping cart I can recommend is the Rose Rock Design in Oklahoma. Roberts is a website designer and is a member of the World Wide Web Consortium. When designing Apple Pie, Roberts paid a great deal of attention to the function and capabilities of search engine spiders. Please note, there may be other search engine friendly shopping carts on the market but this one is the most open to spiders I have ever come across. Image based Index (home, default) pages are notoriously difficult to work with. Many designers create a gorgeous cover-page for a website but forget to place any text on it. While the design may produce a site that looks as organized and efficient as the business it represents, a graphic based Index page will almost certainly be passed over by a search engine spider as it has no body-text to read and record. Often, a designer of an image based page will include links designed as part of the image and linked using "hot-spots" as opposed to providing a text-path for a spider to follow to subsequent pages within the site. As spiders do not follow image links, chances are very high they won't follow links found within an image. There are several other techniques that present difficulties for SEO practitioners however, the five mentioned above are by far the most challenging and at times, impossible. Again, it is important to mention that software designers and search engine engineers are working to enable spiders to move through all types of files regardless of the techniques used to create the site in question. As things stand today however, webmasters might wish to avoid these techniques unless they have a good background in design and a good relationship with their SEO. Jim Hedger is the SEO Manager of