Robin,

I have a section of a web site that deals with comic strips. It’s mostly gif files with hardly any text. What can I do to get the search engines check this out. Adding lots of META tags with keywords will look suspiciously like spamming, SowhatdoIdo ???

Paul Gosselin
St-Augustin, Qc
check le site: http://www.samizdat.qc.ca

Dear Paul,

As you know, the engines can’t read those comic strips, so you have to give them some text they CAN read. Is there a way that you can put a paragraph or two of text above the strips, and then some content at the bottom as well? You can also create a separate content-rich window into the site focused on the keywords that you would want to use for optimizing the comic strip page, and bring in traffic that way. If you go that route, make sure the page is valuable to both users and the engines.

One word of caution — there are a lot of ways to “hide” text in pages like yours, but I don’t encourage that at all. I recently wrote an article on using CSS and Z-0rder as a work around for Flash, and Google was not pleased, though Fast didn’t have a problem with the strategy. Google’s reasoning is that the text was hidden, and they don’t want ANY text hidden so that the engines can see it but the visitors can’t. I’ve also seen people use the <noframes> tag on a non-framed page as a way of adding content to a Web page, but I’ve also heard that this is a practice that Google frowns upon.

So, I asked a Google rep what he thought of the idea, and here’s what he said:

“noframes isn’t that effective. I’d recommend visible text above or below the strip.”

He didn’t say that Google didn’t approve of the use of the <noframes> tag in this instance — he just said that it wouldn’t be very effective.

He also said the same thing I did earlier — if you can add visible text above and below the strip, that would be the best.

GOOD LUCK!

Robin

Robin Nobles conducts live SEO workshops
(http://www.searchengineworkshops.com) in locations across North
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