1. Flash Splash Screens for a Home Page: Words Speak Louder Than (Animated) Actions
Your home page is an extremely important page on your site. It should tell people what you do and what your site is about all in the space of 7 or less seconds. Very often, when we’re asked to re-design an existing site, it has the following characteristics:
- The home page is nothing but a Flash splash screen with some fancy animation.
- If there are any words on the page at all that are not embedded in the Flash animation, it’s “Enter Site”.
- The HTML title tag of the page says “Flash Intro Page”.
Stop and ask yourself what the search engines will index in such a case. It’s likely that your home page will probably only rank for “enter site” and “flash intro page” since those are the only words on the page many search engines can pick up. In fact, since there are so many sites with those words, you may not even rank for them- not that you’ll want to.
Title tags are vital: Google uses it heavily and it’s a fundamental part of any search engine friendly web design.
Text content that can be indexed is also vital. The search engine cannot know intuitively what your website is about if it doesn’t have words to index. Embedding text inside Flash content and expecting search engines to be able to recognize them is a risky business — Google may be able to read some of the text, or it may not. The other search engines may not even be able to extract anything.
Get rid of the Flash splash screen for your home page if you have one, and replace it with a normal web page. Not only will your site rank better, it will also look more professional. Restrict your use of Flash to things that actually need Flash, such interactive online games and videos, and not pages that you want indexed.
2. More Pictures Than Words: A Thousand Words are Worth More Than a Picture
Surely you’ve heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”. Maybe that’s true for us humans but to a search engine, especially using current technology, a picture is useless for determining what your site is about. The search engine cannot see a picture and make out out what product you’re selling. If you want the engine to know the details about your product, write words that effect.
3. Nobody is Linking to You
If your site is not linked to by any other site, some search engines, more specifically Google, may not even be bothered to visit your site in order to index it.
Another tip would be to check your website speed. It important to check site speed, as this is a major Google ranking factor. If your site is slow, you have little chance of a high search position and it will affect your chances of making sales too. According to WebPerformanceToday, Walmart experienced a sharp decline in conversions when its page load times increased from 1 to 4 seconds.
