If Your Beautiful Website is Invisible, Does it Make a Sound in the Woods?

At first blush, this column's title may seem quite tortured. But bear with me, and I'll explain. Obviously, it references the popular philosophical question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" Physics tells us that the falling tree does generate sound waves. The philosophical question is: do those sound waves matter if nobody is around to perceive them as sound?

Similarly, there are many websites that, while beautiful to the human eye, are essentially invisible to search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo & MSN). And, on the Internet, if a website isn't well-known by the search engines, users won't discover it, in order to view it. So, if virtually nobody observes a website, is it still beautiful?

To the trained eye, it's readily apparent when a "beautiful" website is invisible to search engines. (Note: websites can be both attractive and well-known by search engines when properly designed). To the untrained eye, however, this can be a surprise. I've seen many website owners' surprise (shock?) when they learned that their often-times expensive, "beautiful" websites are nearly invisible to the Internet. Oftentimes they were aware of the importance of search engines, but thought their websites were OK because they saw the appropriate, descriptive text that search engines want. What they didn’t realize, however, was that their websites contained pictures of text, not real text. And search engines aren't as smart as people at understanding pictures of text. In other words, to a search engine, a picture of text is just another picture – for all it knows, that picture could have been a person's face, a beautiful mountain stream or a corporate logo. But it's not text.

How can you check if your website is invisible to the search engines (and, by extension, the Internet)? An easy, preliminary test is to try "selecting" the text on a web page with your mouse. Just as you can select text in a word processing program (e.g. Microsoft's Word or Apple's Pages) by dragging your mouse over text while holding down the mouse button, you can select "real" text on a website too. If you can’t select the text of your website with a mouse, it's not real text.

Another, even better test, is to look at the information a search engine has stored about your website. This information is called the search engine's text-version of its cache. Here are the instruction on how to do this with Google (Yahoo and MSN/Live have similar capabilities).

• Browse to www.Google.com
• In the text box, type the following code, which will tell Google to show all pages it has recorded about your website:
  site:www.YourWebAddress.com
  For example, when we perform this test for ourselves, we type the following:
  site:www.ZolMedia.com
• Google will now list the web pages it has indexed for your website. Next to the first one, click the "Cached" link.
• Now click the "Text-only version" link (it's located near the top right corner of the window).

What you see now is a close approximation of what Google knows about your website. Ideally, you should see a substantial amount of text that accurately, and succinctly describes your business and its services or products. If you see no text at all, or very sparse text, that's proof positive that your website was designed in a way that, while it might be pleasing to the human eye, is incomprehensible to the search engines.

This article was originally published in the Coeur d'Alene Press' North Idaho Business Journal