Do the search engines know what your site is about?

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.