Headingsshould be created using H1 tags

I'mnot saying that these things hurt your site. Adding Plastic Ball Chains Manufacturers a Flash animation towell-optimised site won't do it any harm for instance, and there are goodreasons for using these media types. But often they are used for theconvenience, or because the designer likes working that way. Now and then, I'llsee sites that are almost totally created with images. Even the text in thesite is embedded in the pictures. The text is in effect invisible to the searchengines, but if you want the text indexed, you need to put it into the site asactual text.

Moreoften designers use images to create headers because it gives some more controlover the look, but it means the search engines won't read them, and headingsare a very important component of a well-optimised web site. Many headers, forinstance, are an image, not text, even though they have great keywords in it. Don'timagine that the search engines will OCR the image--they won't. The text won'tbe read by the search engines.

Headingsshould be created using H1 tags. I personally prefer to always use text for myheaders, but if you really need more graphical control over the header, lookinto replacement techniques that combine images, or even Flash with text thatthe search engines can read. How about Adobe Flash files? Adobe and manyproponents of Flash design have been pushing the idea that flash can be readand indexed by the search engines.

Sure,that's true, but let me ask you one simple question. How often does a Flashfile come up number one in the search results? Almost never, only for veryobscure search phrases. Thesimple fact is that content embedded in flash does not index well in searchengines.

Thereis definitely a place for affordable small business SEO UK and other animation techniques, but you mustunderstand that there is no place for Flash content in an SEO strategy. Itwon't perform well in the search engines. Use Flash for humans, but plain textfor search engines.

Thereis another problem with Flash: even if a Flash file does come up in the searchengines, it'll be orphaned. Let's go to Google and do an advanced search. We'regoing to ask Google to show us Flash files. Google is still using the old term,Shockwave Flash, so we'll find at the bottom of the dropdown. I'm also going tochange Results per Page to 100. In order to do that, we have to turn off GoogleInstant.

We'lltype a search phrase in. Notice, by the way, that Google is showing us thesyntax we could use directly from the search box without coming into the advancedarea, and let's search. Google presents us with a list of Flash files. Noticethe Flash indicator and here is the problem. If we select one of these files,we'll find that it is orphaned.

It'snot in the web site. We just get the file itself. Now going to go back to theSearch page Google has shown us over 60,000 flash files that match the term'olive oil'. What happens if we remove this and search just for the term 'oliveoil'? What happens to those 63,000 Flash files? Well, if we search the first100, not a single Flash file appears in the top 100. In fact, I tried thisexperiment recently and didn't find a single Flash file in the first 1,000entries.

Flashis great for product demos, for training videos, for sales pitches, and so on,but it's not good for content that you want the search engines to index. Itwill never rank well and even if it did, it'd orphaned, so use it carefully, forthe purposes for which it was intended.

Finally,how about PDF files? Well, they index much better than Flash files, but still,you rarely see a PDF file rank at the top of the search engines. If we return tothe olive oil search, we find only one PDF result out of the top 100 searchresults. And PDF files have the same orphan problem as Flash files. When theydo come up in the search results, you get a PDF file, not a PDF file in the website.

Manysearchers won't even know what site the file came from. PDFs don't rank wellthough, because they don't contain the sort of page components that help webpages rank well.

Componentssuch as title tags and H1 headings, often PDF files find their way onto the webpurely for convenience. A company has a bunch of PDF files used for otherpurposes, or Word files that can quickly convert to PDF, so they just throwthem sort of them up on the web site.

That'sfine, but they're not going to help the site's search engine ranking. It's farbetter to convert these files to HTML, to create real web pages for all thatgreat content. These media types are very useful, but not helpful for SEO, soif you want to rank well, make sure you have readable, indexable text on yoursite.