Not everyone undertaking a search engine optimization campaign has an in depth working knowledge of html or does all the coding for their own site. For most, being aware of a few key concepts is enough. However, those concepts are quite important and understanding them gives you the ability to understand the literature and also check your own site for SEO problems and barriers to getting the search rankings that you deserve.

So, starting at the start, what is this html thing? It stands for HyperText Markup Language, but that’s not terribly informative. Essentially it’s a list of formatting commands that control how things appear in which way on a website. One of html’s great strengths is that you don’t need to define the font, text size, bolding, etc,  for each of your headings and types of content. You define what the heading should look like once and then attach heading tags to each of your titles and subtitles. This saves time and makes consistency much easier to achieve.

Two types of html heading are particularly important for search engine optimisation. H1 (or h1) is the one to use for page titles, and H2 (or h2) for subtitles. Ideally H1 and H2 headings should contain the right keywords, define the content of the page and set out the focus of each section. Search engines pay special attention to them.

You can go one step further and define the styles used across multiple web pages by specifying what headings and other bits of text and site content should look like in a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) rather than on individual pages. The CSS can be called from multiple pages and applies one style consistently. It’s good SEO practice and tidies up your code.

Alt tags are small pieces of text attached to images. They are important because they allow crawlers to interpret an image and get some information from it. Making sure they are defined is a small but significant check to make.

Link text or anchor text is the coloured phrase or word that the user clicks on. What’s in the text is used by search engines, so make sure all your anchor texts are related to what’s on the target page. This can also be a factor in link building strategies, as you can gain more benefit by using the right anchor text on the site that links to you. Often you’ll see ‘Go here’ or similar as link text, which is very poor SEO. Like alt tags, this is a little thing that’s easy to check on and easy to fix.

Frames are an html device that were common a few years ago, but less so now. They allow a page view to be compose of separate pieces. For example, you could keep the same sidebar and move through subpages in the other frame. Like most html they can look and feel effective if used sensibly and coded well, but they do have a tendency to be clunky and a little annoying if you’re not really careful. From an SEO perspective they should be avoided because they complicate navigation through the site and create difficulties for the web crawlers that collect information for search engines. You can use a useful free tool like What Google Sees to find out how the search engines view your site as it currently stands.

Meta tags used to be the most important piece of html on the page. The user doesn’t see anything of the meta tags on the compiled page, and once upon a time they were read by search engines and used to determine what the page was about. However, it’s very easy (and very tempting- resist!) to stuff the meta full of keywords to bursting, and engines have gotten much cleverer. It is possible the meta tags still have an SEO impact, but it’s certain that over-filling them with keywords doesn’t help.

Hopefully, that’ll give you enough html to make a basic check of your website code and make a few tweaks. Remember that a reputable SEO Company can also offer advice and a free analysis of your site.

Flash is a piece of software commonly used to place animated or visually attention grabbing content on websites. It requires an add-on to the web browser to be properly integrated (this bit is important) and it’s quite common across the internet both on personal and commercial websites. The other key point is that Flash is a graphics environment, not a textual one.

The chance that something called Adobe Flash Player is on your computer right now is very high. Without it or something similar, your web browser will get into difficulties and be unable to fully load content from a significant number of websites. An error message will come up asking you to download a Flash player and retry.

At first glance, the idea of having little movies, animations, and pictures and bits of text jumping around your website seems like a good search engine optimization strategy, right? It makes your web page look exciting and gives you lots more design scope. But almost every SEO resource will tell you to avoid building pages completely in Flash. There are a few reasons why.

First, Flash is used- or at least perceived to be used- to add a little pizzazz to websites without much to offer. If something has to flash on and off constantly to get your attention, you’re probably not looking at a well designed website. It’s also going to get annoying very quickly if you are trying to read the content. SEO is all about internet reputation management, so even if your Flash animations are relevant, useful, and fun, be careful and keep the flash content to a banner or two rather than a significant portion of the page.

You’ll notice that we host videos on this site- they’re a great feature and not something to avoid- but code them and place them carefully. It is paramount that any animations on your site are voluntary. Here, you click on the video if you want to watch it. Subjecting visitors to the same animation clip every time they enter will win you no friends and won’t add any benefit to your SEO efforts.

The other reason is more technical. Until recently, Google couldn’t extract much information from Flash objects. Because the whole philosophy of Flash is based on graphics and not text that can be read, processed, and ‘understood’ by a computer, it’s opaque to text-based analysis. Google are pretty clever, of course, and they can now squeeze some information out of some Flash objects, but the process is problematic and inelegant- best avoided. Flash navigation brings a whole new set of issues with it. The take home message is that the web crawlers that collect the information search engines use to create rankings and results pages don’t like Flash objects.  We have some flash on our site, but it is vastly outnumbered by text-rich content to help search engines discover what it is about more easily.

There are also compatibility issues which less related to SEO but very related to your customers. We mentioned earlier that Flash objects require special software to load and play. The problem is, the Flash players and their standards are different under Windows, Linux, Mac OS and all the rest. One of the key points about the web is interoperability- you should be able to explore a website fully no matter which platform you’re running at the time.  At the current time, although a few mobile devices have some basic flash (flash lite) support, an ever increasing number of users are using mobile phones and other comparable devices to access and browse the internet, and they can’t see flash at all. By building a website in a language that discounts these potential customers, you are no only limiting the success of any search engine optimisation efforts, but limiting your audience too.

The heart of on-site SEO is written content, and for a search engine optimization strategy to be successful it needs to get it hands dirty creating as much content as it can afford. An obvious problem with this content driven approach is that an optimized webpage must serve as a vessel for written content, and this can have implications on its aesthetic quality. No more is this dichotomy more explicit than in regards to flash – but surely the search engines won’t penalize me for creating a stylish page?

Before exploring the potential pitfalls of a flash page, a distinction should be made between pages that have flash elements and those which are entirely flash: i.e. a page that is html based but has a few flash elements is probably not going to cause any negative search engine optimization issues, its only when a page is entirely flash based that your SEO efforts might suffer.

Proceeding on from that clarification we need to explore just why SEO and flash don’t mix (or at least don’t mix so far!) and this is down to a few factors – from the obvious to the not so obvious. An immediate problem with a flash based site is that it will have only one url; in terms of search engine optimization this is potentially catastrophic, for example having essentially only a single page creates but one entry point to your site, which precludes certain important SEO techniques such as deep linking (i.e. linking into a subpage on your site.)

Secondly and equally importantly, not only will have a flash page have just a single url, but it will undoubtedly be “un-wordy,” that is to say it will be built around graphics rather than written and keyword optimized content. Again in regards to SEO this is potentially catastrophic, as your page will not carry enough keywords to show the search engines that the content of the page matches up to the meta tags. There is also a more subtle issue with this “graphic” approach, i.e. the words on your flash page might be in an unfamiliar font displayed as a graphic – which will not be readable by the search engine’s bots.

So far it sounds as though the visual quality of the internet is being restrained by SEO concerns, however, this isn’t the whole story. Take mobile phones for example, and specifically the iphone, which does not and apparently wont ever support flash, neither will the upcoming ipad support flash either! So where will this leave your flash based page? – well nowhere, regardless of your search position.

So far SEO and flash appear to be incompatible, but is this entirely fair? Well the short answer is no. It would be silly to underestimate the search engines and in recent years there has been a definite attempt to give flash based pages a fair hearing in regards to search engine prominence, and it is surely only a matter of time until flash pages are accepted into the higher echelons of a search engine’s rankings – until that day however, perhaps total flash isn’t the best way to go if you want your search engine optimization efforts to pay off!

The way a website looks and feels does count towards how much users will like it, so it is very relevant to SEO strategy. In this post we’ll discuss a few things you can do to make sure your website is tidy, looks sharp, and is easy to update and maintain.

A lot of SEO companies use and recommend cascading style sheets (CSS). Instead of specifying what all the different headings and text should look like in each html page, placing those commands in an external CSS sheet and calling that one sheet from all your different web pages makes it very easy to ensure a consistent style throughout your network of different pages, and it also makes it very easy to change the look of them. Regular updates and changes are good for search engine optimization, and tweaking the CSS now and again makes the updates a lot more obvious to regular users. You can evolve the look of the site as you go along. Keep what works, change what doesn’t.

As we say frequently, all content must be written for people, not for web crawlers. Aside from deterring visitors and adding no value, poor or spammy content is now starting to be detected by search engine algorithms which parse text, and that will happen more and more in the future. Content must be readable and useful if your site is to succeed. Brush up on your writing skills, or get an SEO company to generate some content for you.

Use text based navigation. Icons are cute but their meaning isn’t as obvious as a piece of text, and web crawlers collecting information have problems with them so they are best avoided. Breadcrumb navigation across the top of a page is useful both for usability and SEO, showing either the path the user has followed or the relation of the current page to the main one. Colour should come from images, sidebars, and larger headings. Avoid the temptation to use html to make bits of text body brightly coloured or flash on and off. Not only can it be difficult to read, but it also gets irritating after a fairly short period of time. You want to hold user’s attention, not grab it for a moment than lose it again. A logo is something that will appear all over your pages, so it’s worth choosing carefully and probably paying a professional to make one for you.   Other sites won’t want to link to you unless you look professional and your website design and architecture is of a good standard.

Pay attention to navigation. Make it easy for users to find what they came for, and show them (tactfully!) links to other areas they might be interested in. Auxiliary information like terms and conditions and ordering information should be available in a link bar, but kept off the main page and behind a nofollow link.

Nothing is stopping you doing research. Have a look at your competitors’ pages and take some notes. Grab some layout and design ideas from other websites you already use and apply the ones that work on your own site.