Inbound marketing is one of the hottest topics for marketers today. Whether it’s referral traffic from blogs, tweets or the king – search engine optimization, it’s obvious that visitors coming to your website on their own accord (or searching for what you do) are usually the best leads.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is key for inbound marketing as it’s how relevant content such as blogs, tweets, videos, and websites get found – and how you can get qualified leads – for free!

One of the most important tasks for a marketer is to get the search engines to discover and index all page content of your website.  Search engines generally can find the pages on your website but,  unfortunately, there are certain website elements commonly used by web designers that prevent search engine robots from doing their job — discovering the web pages.   I’m going to list some common ones so that you’ll be aware of them and take them into consideration when developing your websites.

1) Flash – When Flash is used properly,  it can make a web page look very good and attractive.   However, when it’s used in the wrong place, it’ll prevent search engines from finding the content and positioning your website appropriately in the search results.  Generally, I’d advise not to use flash in creating your  navigation menus.

2) Image content – Do you know that even though you can read the text on the web page, the text content can be an image. Most search engines are not able to read the text on the images.  It’s also harder to perform content updates on the page when using image text.  To find out whether the text on the web page is an image or not, you can use your mouse to select and highlight the text. If the text cannot be selected,  it’s likely image text.

3) Javascript link – If  your website is using Javascript links, most search engine robots won’t be able to follow the links to find the other web pages.  Move your mouse over the link.  If you see that it says something that starts with “http://” in the status bar of your browser, you are OK.  If the test in the status bar starts with “javascript” in the status bar, the link is using javascript and is not search engine friendly.

4) Session ID – Websites that require a session ID to track visitors may have problems when ‘visited’ by search engines.  Session ID’s in URLs are the absolute kiss-of-death to search engine accessibility.  You can tell it’s a session ID in the URL address, as it will say ‘sessionid=xxxxxx’ where xxxxxx is a lot of numbers.

5) Frames – they don’t usually prevent search engine robots from discovering the web pages.  Content within a frame is not part of the same URL, it is actually another page inside the current page.  As a result, when searchers click through the search results, they might be landing on the ‘internal’ page which doesn’t contain the other parts of the original page.  This will also affect the web experience of your visitors.

6) Splash or intro pages – they usually contain a movie which search engines don’t understand and subsequently won’t index.  It’s also a fancy delay tactic that is disliked by most viewers. It also provides only one link for the robot to follow if it can find it.

There are solutions and workarounds to these problems. If you notice your website has the above search engine robot barriers, you will want to address the problem as soon as possible.  Allowing search engine robots to index the content of your web pages will dramatically increase your success on getting leads  from search engines!