Splash pages and Flash-lose ‘em.

I love designing beautiful splash pages. Splash pages are “entry” pages for websites. They are usually very graphic heavy, have no text, and you click a beautiful piece of art to enter the site. Yes, they are beautiful. But they are hell on your search engine rating aspirations. The reason for this is that there is no text on them, and remember, text is “food” for the search engines. With a splash page, you are giving the search engines nothing to spider when they land on your site. Therefore, as beautiful as they are, don’t have a splash page. The first page a search engine should “see” should be rich in meta tags and keywords….lots of information and text to spider.

People who have to wait for a Flash splash page to load, or even a splash navigation system, are hurting themselves in a few ways. First, surfers are impatient creatures and hate waiting unless they have chosen to click on something to view it. If they are forced to wait for a navigation bar to load, or a splash page to run, they will get annoyed and click off. Secondly, the search engines cannot spider Flash code. They can’t read it. They are working on the issue, but it’s not a priority since Flash has lost a goodly part of its appeal since it first appeared. Today, most web designers are staying away from it because it is becoming passe.

I am not against Flash altogether, it has its place if used sparingly and creatively. For example, Flash photo galleries and slideshows can be a beautiful and effective way to display your artwork. However, make sure you *also* have plain text on any page you have Flash for the search engines to read. And keep your Flash OFF your index page. It will hurt you.

SITEMAPS: YES.
A sitemap is a page that has a listing of links that comprise every page of your website. A sitemap is really not for your visitors; it’s mostly for the search engines and specifically Google. Sitemaps are extremely valuable in helping search engines index every page of your site effectively. There are even software programs that can make you a sitemap by clicking a few buttons, one of my favorites is by Coffee Cup Software, and it’s called Sitemapper. Not very expensive, and I highly recommend it. A text link to your sitemap should be on every page ideally, but most importantly on your index.html page.

Once you have your sitemap created, open an account with Google. The easiest way is to open an email account with Gmail, Google’s web-based email. Once you have a Google account, you will see a link for webmaster tools. In this section, you can submit your Google Sitemap so they will validate your site. You can also read tons of cool traffic statistics once Google validates your sitemap. For more information about Google sitemaps, take out a Google account and read up on it or feel free to ask me.

ROBOTS.TXT: YES.
A robots.txt file is a straight text file you upload to your root directory. This is an important file because a search engine will look for this file automatically as soon as they land on your domain. If they find it, the chances are they will spider your site regularly and effectively increases threefold. How do you get a robots.txt file made? Simple. Either Google “robots.txt generator” or you can get one here. Just do the wizard and download your text file, then upload it to your root directory.