What coding works for SEO and what coding doesn't?

[wrconard]

Hi:

I recently learned about inline styles and that Google started penalizing sites for that in October. Then I was told that Wix and Flash don't work (or work well) either for SEO as the engines won't crawl them (I think). Does anyone know of a blog that goes over everything that doesn't work so that I could recognize it when I look at someone's code. Anyone know of such a resource?

Cheers,

Wes

[wrconard]

Hi Mark:

Thanks very much for your note. I tried something similar the SEO Browser, and it shows you what the search engines see. Very useful.

Cheers, Wes.

[maxweb]

The general rule of using HTML for everything is one that I would follow. If you're unsure if something is crawlable, try downloading the web developer plugin for chrome http://chrispederick.com/work/web-developer/. Then disable javascript and plugins and refresh the page. Any content that can't be seen then probably won't be seen by search engines either.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Wesley,

I would recommend going over a couple of technical SEO audits you can find on the web. They give a clear insight in what SEOs are looking for when doing a technical audit for SEO. It mostly contains way more than only checking for Flash or Wix sites that hide or dont' display any content in their HTML.

[wrconard]

Thanks very much, I'll definitely try the adwords and the cached versions.

Cheers,

wes

[FCBM]

Basically a web page has to be crawlable. If an engine can't crawl it than you don't exist. SEO 101, use html for all text. Google has made strides to try to understand what sites are about but to keep it easy for crawlers use html.

As for a tool you can use googles adwords tool and add the url into "landing page" and see how some of the site gets crawled by a simple bot. You can also look at google cached versions of sites and look at the "text only" options, that should give you a good view of what the crawlers see.

Hope that helps.