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Is there anyone out there able to help?!?! Pleeeaaassseeeee. I need to know what is wrong with the site and how I can get it up the search engine listings (or something like that).
Please, please help. I'm in great distress over this.
thank you so much,
Linda
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[edited by: tedster at 1:48 am (utc) on Aug. 30, 2004]
If your website has no real text (in other words, it just has graphic images of text) then the advice you received is correct - search engines don't read the text in an image. The meta tag issue is relatively minor, but they can be some help.
There are two facets to showing up on search engines. One we called "on-page factors" such as the title, text, headings, meta tags, and so on. And the second is called "off-page factors", or most basically, the links to your site from other sites. They may come from from directories, friends websites, wherever.
It's a big topic, and in fact it makes up much of our conversation here. If you feel overwhelmed by it all, and are completely non-technical yourself, perhaps your friend could read here for a bit.
Evey forum here has a "library" link toward the top of the page that holds a collection of the best, and most critical posts. So that's a great place to start.
And the one thread to read that really summarizes everything so well is this:
Successful Site in 12 months with Google alone [webmasterworld.com]
One part of your question has to do with meta tags - you might also want to read this thread from earlier in August:
How many meta tags are too many? [webmasterworld.com]
Yes, search engines will read the anchor tag that contains an image element, or the alt attribute within an <img> tag. But even in these cases, it is not the image file itself that is being read, but the HTML mark-up that contains the image.
