~~~Search Engine Optimization~~~
From: Dave Welsh
Hi Jill. I've read your article "All About Title Tags", and I have a question.
My index page is a "choose your language" kind of page and I don't
want a whole bunch of page content cluttering it up. What I did was
make invisible text that should work well with my title. In your
article you mentioned that this invisible text was not a good idea. Is
this just because people should be able to see the content or because
it has something to do with SEO?
Dave Welsh
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Oh, Dave, Dave, Dave...
Obviously, you haven't been a Rank Write reader for very long. I have
a feeling that many of our long-time readers were cringing when they
read your question, because they knew what would be coming next.
Invisible text? In 2001? I don't think so.
Why? Well, for both of the reasons you mentioned in your question -
because people want to see content, AND because of SEO. I'm not going
to speak to the whole "why you need visible content on your page"
issue, as that's Heather's realm, and she's covered it completely in
the past. In fact, I'm sure she winced when she read, "I don't want a
whole bunch of page content cluttering it up"! (See Heather's recent
article "Copy Sells, Flash Doesn't" for her views on the importance of content.)
From the search engines' perspective, they've always denounced
invisible text on the page. After all, if it's not important enough
for your visitors to read, then why should the search engines consider
it important? Can you use invisible text and get a high ranking?
Well, apparently this does still work in some engines, as I do
occasionally see pages that are using it. Just because you *can* do
something slimy, should you? I suppose that's up to you and your
ethical standards. Remember, however, it's pretty easy for humans to
spot invisible text on the page. When I notice large white areas at
the bottom of pages, I automatically point my mouse there and
highlight it. I'd say that 80% of the time hidden text comes into
view! Some people (not me) do report this sort of thing to the search
engines.
So now that I'm done spanking Dave, what can he do instead?
Interestingly enough, yesterday I got asked a similar question about
these language "jump" pages by one of my clients. My first thought
was to simply let the main page be the English version of the site (as
my client's site was a dot.com which are typically written in English
anyway). Somewhere in the navigation of the page you could also put
the options to click to the other language sites. Is this an
American-centric fix? Sure! But the Web does seem to be dominated by
English language sites and most people looking for sites in other
languages probably are used to finding many English sites. Anyone
looking for the foreign language version will easily be able to click
to their language of choice, with no hard feelings.
Another solution would be to keep the English version on the dot.com
URL, but create subdomains for each foreign language or
country-specific site. So you'd have www.yourcompany.com for your
main English site, then brasil.yourcompany.com for your Brazil site,
denmark.yourcompany.com for your Denmark site, etc. All of these
could then be written and optimized in their own language, and also
have options to click to the other language sites.
One other alternative would be to use country-specific domains instead
of subdomains. In fact, it might be easier to get into the
International engines if you're using the appropriate country's suffix
URL. So for your Brazil site, you'd have the domain
www.yourcompany.br, and for your Denmark site, you'd have the domain
www.yourcompany.dk, etc. As an aside, if anyone's curious as to what
all the various countries' domain suffixes are, check out this page that lists them all.
Hope this helps!
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
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