View Full Version : Graphic placement and crawlers
Does anyone have a good reference of how graphic placement effects crawlers scanning your web page?
rustybrick
09-23-2004, 04:53 PM
Welcome to the forums! :)
Anyway, I am not sure I totally understand your question.
Graphics do not deter search spiders from crawling your site.
But search engines can not read text on a graphic, besides for the alt text.
Can you just reword your question please?
Actually I knew that..
I will rephrase, I built a site design that I thought was very user and search engine friendly only to have a consultant hired by my client make a few comments that I thought rediculous.
One of the things they said was as follows:
"While the large graphic used on the Home page and the smaller image used on the sub pages are attractive in their current locations, they serve as an impediment to the spidering process. Since the search engines begin spidering at the top of the page and work their way down in a left to right fashion, it reasons that keyword-rich text should come before the graphics. It is therefore recommended that the graphics be moved to a new location, like the right side of the page, in order to enable the search engines to encounter the keyword-rich text before the graphics."
If you would like to see the design you can view it here:
http://www.dakotasoft.com/home_ns_asp.asp
This is not a finalized page, it is still in development. It will give you some idea what is mentioned above.
Any comments would be appreciated.
Mike
rustybrick
09-23-2004, 05:45 PM
Alright, what they are saying is true. You do want your content at the top of the page source code. It's not necessary, but it does help. You can program the site in CSS, and use positioning to ensure that the content of the page is the first thing found in the source.
In addition, I see you are using JavaScript/DHTML (?) drop down image menus. The spiders might have difficulty with them. You can program those in a search engine friendly manner, but I see you also added text links at the bottom as secondary navigation (so good job with that.