I will give you the basics of the most recent example which I have seen while keeping back enough to guard the identity of the business person involved. This person needed a new website for youth oriented business. A friend asked me if I was interested in doing this site as a fairly decent rate due to the fact that it was for a worthy cause. I spoke to the merchant and she elected to take another approach. Using a very popular Flash Development tool which is included in the Control Panel of some Hosting Services she built a basically decent looking website. I didn’t really mind since I was a little too busy to get excited about deep discount work at the time. I saw that her site went up and I looked it over as well as I could; viewing the source code of the site and so forth. I concluded that this site would never make it into the search engines. After several months my predictions have proved to be true. In this present condition this site will never be picked up by any search engine.

If any person follows these five simple steps, he/she should be able to avoid the Search Engine Optimization Dead End or Black Hole.

1. Avoid the temptation to build your site or any page you want indexed in the search engines with Flash technology. Flash can be a wonderfully beautiful and animated medium as we look at a flash page. However, Flash looks like a mere eight to 15 lines of code on a web page. All content is buried in other sorts of files that the search engine cannot see. Therefore if your page is made in Flash, the search engine will not see any of the headings, or the paragraphs, sentences or words or images. It will merely see the lines of code and it will move on. A small section of flash will not hurt but a site made in flash will have a very hard time. Build the pages you want to be indexed in HTML, not Flash.
2. Avoid the use of Flash menus. Once again a god old Flash menu can be very eye appealing. Since the Search engine cannot see what is going on it cannot follow the links in the menu. If you have an HTML or CSS menu the search engine will follow the links if you permit it. It will find the rest of your pages. That is a good thing. A Flash menu will prevent this process. Avoid it.
3. Have a page title in the head of your page. There is a tag in the head of your page that is made for the title of your page. My acquaintance did not have a title on her web page. You can tell that by looking at the source. Your page title should match the first H1 heading of your page. If you do not understand any of this then you need to do some research and learn how. If you have hired a Web Designer make sure that your page has a title. It should look like this . Many WYSIWYG editors provide for giving the page a title even if they don’t prompt you for the other Meta Tags.
4. Develop a set of Meta Tags and place them in the head of your web page. Meta tags are in the code of the page but not visible as the page is viewed in the browser. These tags are very important. My person’s page didn’t have any meta tags at all. There is a Meta Description tag that will hold a couple of lines that describe the content of the web page. There is also a Meta Key Words tag that holds a number of key words that tell the Search Engine what the page is about and how to categorize it. The Key Words should be present a number of times in the page but not overly much. There are a number of articles, blogs and free tools that will help a person get some Meta Tags.
5. Have a “robots.txt” file in the root folder of your web site. The robots.txt file tells the search engine how to react as it surveys (crawls) your site. The robots file tells the engine about what folders it can look into and which ones it cannot. It can also call some of the pages as off limits. You may even ban certain search engines from crawling your site. The robots.txt file will be pointed to by a Meta Tag that is in the head of the index.html file. Some rogue engines will ignore what is in the robots.txt file. However, it is necessary to have this file at any rate. If you submit your site to Google it will most likely be ignored if it does not have a “robots.txt” file. Ignore these facts at the peril of your site.

Here are five essential tips to keep your site from sliding into the Search Engine Optimization Dead End. This is not the end of the journey but merely the beginning of the journey. SEO will require a consistent level of work over a long, long time in order to be effective. The thing that I thought was absurd; the thing that made me roll with laughter is that the famous Flash Design tool present in the Web Hosting Control Panel was phony in its claims. It claims that your site will be Search Engine Optimized; ” it is one of our features,” was the claim. I have never seen a website which was more ill prepared for the Search Engines. As I stated before, “In this current state this site will never be indexed in the Search Engines.” It is in Search Engine Dead End. How sad for the owner.

Source by Greg Nicholl