Internet Explorer, Firefox and other browsers can be very tolerant of programming errors in your website. 

And when you make an error it is easy to see when the browser doesn’t like it. 

However, Google and the other search engines use proprietary software to analyse web content and do not tell you when they don’t understand your website. 

This can lead to pages or sections of pages being ignored by the search engines and you are none the wiser. 

In their Webmaster Guidelines, Google advise webmasters to check that their HTML is valid.  Failure to do this can lead to poor rankings without any clear pointer to the source of the problem. 

We have recently seen a number of sites that were only partially indexed by the search engines and where the code contained numerous HTML errors.  Fixing the errors quickly improved the results. 

You can check your code at http://validator.w3.org/ - remember to check the whole site not just the home page. 

Ensuring that the HTML code on your website is valid is a essential step to achieving good rankings for the search engines.

We are often asked why a client’s small to medium size web site doesn’t do as well in the search engine results as a major competitor. 

It helps to explain that when indexing a web site the search engines treat every page individually.  So, a large site has the opportunity to have a page dedicated to every relevant topic and to link the pages so that they all have a number of incoming links.  The small site covering the same range of topics cannot achieve the same focus with each page nor provide the same number of incoming links. 

When the search engines evaluate a page they not only consider what it says but also how focussed it is on that topic.  A page covering three topics, one after the other, may be seen as less relevant to a search as a page covering just the topic of the search.    Adding more content to a page to try and cover more keywords may be counterproductive if it dilutes the main topic of the page. 

The solution is to be very focussed in the content of each page.  Keep each page to as narrow a topic as possible, if necessary dividing a page in two rather than trying to cover two topics on one page.  Then ensure that each page has a Title, Description and Keywords that summarise the subject of the page and do not stray from the theme of the page. 

If your business is by nature very general it can be better to focus the website on the five or six main areas in which you operate and dedicate a page to each and then consolidate all less important areas onto one page. The alternative of five or six general pages is likely to be less productive. 

Using Flash on your website can improve the look and feel of the site but it may cause problems for the search engines. 

The search engines see Flash content much as they see an image - with little text content that can be indexed.   

If the Flash is just used in a banner or as a way of displaying a moving image then there should be no problems.  However if the whole site is developed using Flash it will not usually get good rankings in the search engines results.  In particular:

• although search engines are beginning to be able to extract text from Flash, it is unlikely that a Flash site will be seen to be content rich.
• all the content of a Flash animation belongs to the same page so a site developed in Flash may be seen as having as little as one page. The more pages a site has the more opportunities it has to be indexed by the search engines.
• Links in Flash are not followed. If the only route to a page on the site is through a Flash based menu then pages on the site may not be found by the search engine and hence not indexed.

In summary, our advice on using Flash is:

• use Flash to display images and animations that complement the main content of the site. 
• if the Flash contains important text then repeat that text in an HTML page. 
• don’t use Flash for navigation.
• every page on the site should be an HTML page which may or may not use Flash to illustrate the content of the page. 
• avoid using one Flash animation to display several topics.