Designing a website for search engines is similar to designing a website for regular visitors, although there are some important points to keep in mind during the design stage of your website.
Search Engines & Media
Search engines are comparable to primitive web browsers in that they have virtually no support for media files such as Flash movies, images, JavaScript etc... The reason for this is simply that "rich media" is far more complex than regular text and requires far more processor power & memory to parse (analyze). Given that most of the web is in regular text / html format, it does not yet make sense for search engines to invest such vast amounts of money as required to parse these elements given that the ROI (Return on Investment) would be low.
When designing your website, we recommend using as much regular text as possible as this is far more likely to achieve better results than rich media type websites. You may wish to use our link checker to have a glance at how spiders see your website. Alternatively, you can use the text based "Lynx" browser to see a similar simulation.
Search Engines & Links
Hyperlinks are an essential component of how spiders / robots operate. By following hypertext links, just like humans, search engines can find more web pages than if they were to rely webmasters to submit the URL of each page on their website. Search engines can follow only simple HTML links. Be sure to use simple HTML links and not JavaScript links or Flash buttons. Text links are also much more effective than image links.
