Beautiful Website, Invisible on Search Engines -- Why?
My friend has served as pastor a church in the Tacoma area for the last decade. I thought that using Google to search for the name of his church and the city I could easily find the church website. Wrong. It's a very large church in a city of 85,000, but it's practically invisible on the search engines.
As I began to study the website, I could see why. It is built on a sophisticated content management system provided at a reasonable price by a company that specializes in producing beautiful, template-driven websites for churches. The problem is that the navigation system is very unfriendly to search engine spiders -- in multiple ways. Let me detail the problems:
- The homepage has a "splash page" made up of a single GIF image and no text content that is spider food for search engine spiders. No content, no interest from search engines and no keywords to index. If the splash page used Flash, it might load faster, but be just as impenetrable to search engines.
- The navigation system on the splash page is an image map. Period. It contains no text links on the homepage, but since search engines can't read image maps, the search engine is stopped in its tracks. It has nowhere to go and nothing to index. Few modern sites rely on image maps these days for just this reason. But even if a spider could read image maps and get into the main part of the church's site, it would still have problems because...
- The site is built using HTML frames, a technique that was the rage of website developers in the 1990s, now rather widely denounced for its search engine unfriendliness. It is possible to build frame sites that are search engine friendly, just harder. But my friend's church site was a nightmare. The only reason for this frameset was apparently to show the brand name and a link to the website development company at the bottom of the page. In other words, the frames at the same time helped the developers and were toxic to the customers. Oops.
- The church homepage within the frame system contained no text content, just a title and a frame system. No text content, no interest from search engines and no keywords to index. To get to content the spider would need to get into the interior content pages. But that was difficult, too.
- NOFRAMES tags stopped search engine spiders. NOFRAMES tags were invented so that old version 2 web browsers that couldn't read frames could still drill down to the content of the site. But the NOFRAMES tags for this website were constructed wrong. They were:
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"><br /><br /></body>
Since this was the main frameset page that contained no content or navigation links whatsoever, the search engine spiders are stopped again. They have no URLs to go to, no links. Nothing. But if they had been pointed to interior webpages of the site.... - The interior webpage URLs all point to the website developer's domain, such as:
http://account.developer_domainname.com/acct/10664-8591/tmpl/
http://account. developer_domainname.com/acct/10664-8591/tmpl/tm222_min_list.php?cat=Get+Involved%21
In other words, the church's interior webpage URLs are not only hidden from humans and unfindable by the search engines, they are under the developer's domain name with a URL that is long and unfriendly to humans -- and perhaps to search engines as well. Why should your organization's webpages be under some other organization's domain name? Ignorance, putting it kindly. - None of the interior webpages can be bookmarked or linked to. Since the main church website URL http://www.church-domain.org/site/ goes to a frame system, the URL of all interior pages is hidden in the address window of the web browser that shows the webpage URL. Not only are search engines prevented from entering, but humans can't link to parts of the site that interests them.
Do you get the picture? From the standpoint of beauty and design, the site is very nice. It is also easy for organization staff to update using its content management system. But from a search engine visibility standpoint -- that is, marketing to the community outside the congregation, the site is essentially invisible and useless. Since most websites exist to let the world or the community know about your organization, an unfriendly site navigation system can be fatal to your goal. Make sure your organization's website doesn't fall prey to this kind of search engine myopia.
Krish.
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