How do Search Engines Read a Website

Search engines do not see websites like humans. They can not process images, and can not translate them into the content. Search engines crawl a website by reading the code generated with HTML, ASP, PHP and other web languages. A website made up mostly of images looks mostly blank to a search engine.

Sometimes, what you see as text on a page isn’t really the text. Some developers create Web page text in an image editor program such as Photoshop, Paint Editors, etc and instead of recreating the text as code, they simply post their image to look like HTML.

Let’s take the following website which we had created in the post How to Create an Online Store & Business Website in 30 Minutes

How do Search Engines Read a Website

The problem is, the logo of the website “My Online Furniture” isn’t text in actual, it is just a picture. And it will not be visible to the search engine. A search engine can only see a blank spot where the image is. Here’s how a search engine might see your site:

How do Search Engines Read a Website

A similar problem exists with audio, video, and Flash animations as well. (Flash is a plugin that runs animated content in a website that users can often interact with.) Some highly interactive pages that are completely created in Flash can be practically invisible to search engines.

Creating a page on your website with lots of images, or with a lot of flash animations, can be fine depending on your target customer. For example, Image gallery sites obviously want to showcase their images. However, these are not search engine friendly. Hence if your business website depends on being found by the search engines, you should think about creating a few pages with descriptive text (such as “about” pages or even adding a business blog to your site). This will make it much easier for search engines to find and rank your site. Adding text descriptions to images (using alt text attribute) for such sites helps as well.

Thanks for visiting. For queries and suggestions, emails are welcome at learnweb@hostingcolumn.com.

Subscribe to Hosting Column for latest updates and posts.