As some business owners find out (the hard way) many web designers make mistakes with the structuring of navigation in ways that search engines can’t access their website. If they can’t access them, then they hinder the ability to get pages of a site listed in the search engines’ index!

When it comes to successful searches online, there two important points of view: search engines and humans.

They are not viewed in the same way at all! When designing your website, your primary focus is your target audience. Following this, technology needs to be included to help search engines add your website to their data bases. You see, search engine bots read text, and you want it to find out all about your site and include it in their index. In order to accomplish this, you need the right information coded into web pages.

You can check out your site and view it as a search engine would. By utilizing online tools you can identify elements of your content are visible and indexable to the engines. You can check whether the pages you’re building are visible to search engines. This includes images and links. Do they show up? If not, what can you do about it?

To perform better in Google and Bing search engine listings, it’s important for content to be in the proper format. You can also use more advanced methods for areas requiring a greater formatting or visual display style. When using images, provide alt text and assign them in gif, jpg, or png format. “Alt attributes” give search engines a text description of visual content. Supplement search boxes with navigation and crawable links. This link structure lets crawlers browse pathways of a website. This is vital to finding all pages on a website. Supplement Flash or Java plug-ins with text on the page. Also, provide a transcript for video and audio content if words and phrases used are meant to be indexed by engines. When comes to helping those bots learn what you have to offer, specific use of text is crucial. Never assume anything.

Web Fox Marketing is a Michigan SEO, digital marketing, and web design agency. Our website company in Livonia MI services our local community near Novi, Northville, West Bloomfield, Farmington Hills, Southfield and beyond. In addition to digital marketing services, we are experienced in search engine optimization, PPC marketing (Google Adwords), Michigan SEO, social media marketing, and more!

On a final note, as you would expect, Google has great resources when talking about SEO. Here is a great video produced by Google, “How does Google Search work?” check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyCYyoGusqs. Please contact us if you have any questions, thank you for clicking!