DiveIntoThePool.com doesn’t rank as well as I would like in the SERPs for keyword phrases like “free online dating” so I’m always thinking of what I can do to try and make my site appealing not only to my users but also to the robot crawlers from Google, Yahoo and Bing. I thought about the organization of information on my homepage. I love the main smiling image and basic search form on our website but how did search engines see it? I used the Web Developer plugin for Firefox to disable CSS and start browsing my site. I’m only sad I didn’t check this out sooner.

Homepage with no SEO

Sub-page with no SEO

Horrible! How are search engines going to know what the content of my site is about, it doesn’t even register I have a dating site till half way down the page on the homepage! The sub-page doesn’t fair much better, search engines don’t use OCR tech when crawling to my knowledge, that page doesn’t ever say the title in text form!

So I used some CSS wizardry, a little positioning and I managed to reverse the order of the sign in and search content and the text content that describes my service on the page. For IE6 and IE7 there was a little JavaScript involved but the end result is excellent and much more friendly to the robots.

Homepage with new SEO

The sub-page was an easy fix though, set the image as a background-image for the header and text-indent the H1 text inside for the desired result.

Sub-page with new SEO