In these recent economic troubles, people are striving to get every cent out of their marketing dollar. SEO has become even more a buzz-term than it has to date (hard to believe), as businesses are realizing their website’s are the fastest and most cost-effective way to get the word out. It is staggering then, the number of sites we come across that spend so much time and money making the site look pretty, but completely neglect the content.
One common practice (and one that we especially scratch our heads over) is having all of the site’s content as images. Not sure what this means? Go on to any non-flash site, and try highlighting the copy. If it highlights like any old word document, you know the site is using HTML copy and thus searchable by Google and the other competitors. However, if you just highlight big blocks where the copy should be, you know the website has decided all the content should be shown as images. The reason this is inadvisable; in order for your site to be picked up by search engines, they need to have something to index you with. The site’s copy is a great way to do this, as it’s searchable, relevant (hopefully) and filled with keywords. However, search engines can’t index images, so all that relevant content you worked so hard to create is going completely to waste.
So if you have a website and aren’t sure how the content was laid-out, do yourself a favor and try the simple highlighting test. If you do have images, replace those with searchable copy immediately. It is simple, and can often lead to great results!
