Spider Bot Traps - JavaScript

Search engines spiders are mainly interested in visible text content be it page text or your navigation links. What they record across your entire site, from the text content and text links, if any, helps establish your site's relevance for the keyword phrases relevant to your web sites content or theme.

If you are looking into a web site for your company, remember, there is nothing better than good descriptive content about your products, services or your unique theme, to get you into the top rankings for your keyword phrases. Sites with pages that are little more than a handful of graphics/photos, with a 20 word or less mission statement or the like on each page, can't compete with one that has the oodles of factual/helpful/descriptive copy writing about the theme.

When javascript-driven drop down menu's were the flavor of the month with many developers and would-be site owners, it made your navigation links completely invisible making it nigh on impossible for a search engine spider to locate and span every page.

But don't panic if you still have js-driven menus, our developer, can implement css driven drop down menus that are already search engine compatible.

It is also common practice for developers to stuff javaScript code in the Head tags in your page source code because it is invisible to the visitor viewing your site in their browser. However this practice increases the page size and slows the spider robot down. This leaves less time for Spider robots to span your site, therefore fewer pages are likely to be crawled with the JavaScript in your page code, especially on larger sites.

Externally linked Javascript

Using external JavaScript files will remove any validation problems that are caused by JavaScript, making a site even more search engine friendly. It allows spider robots faster access to the text content so more pages are added to the index.

Check your pages, do they have large amounts of JavaScript in them. This is completely unnecessary, as it can be pulled in from external files which can greatly reduce the file size of web pages, causing them to load faster and be more search engine friendly.

Creating a separate JavaScript file is very similar to creating an external CSS file. Simply make a new JavaScript file with whatever name you like (such as “script.js”). Then place your existing JavaScript into this file and replace it with a link to the file with the following format:

<SCRIPT language=JavaScript1.2 src="/scripts/script.js" type="text/javascript"></SCRIPT>

Using external JavaScript makes site modification and maintenance a lot easier, for example, someone who wants to use the same JavaScript banner on every page their site could use links to an external page instead of repeating the same code; and would only need to change one piece of script to make changes to the whole site.

Search engine optimisation tutorial - optimization of a web site built using frames