Why are my keywords not being seen by the webcrawlers?

For SEO, content is king. META tags help a bit and should be provided, particularly the TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags. While it is worth including, Google and all of the major search engines now ignore the KEYWORDS meta tag. Webmasters abused it so heavily, pouring the contents of a dictionary in to try to rank for every word know to man, that they gave up on it.

The search spider wants to see ASCII text in the body of the page. It cannot read text rendered into images. There is scant text inside the site. There are no H1 or H2 tags or A tags wrapped around keywords. H1 and then lesser headlines indicate to a spider’s eyes that this text is more important than adjacent content. Same goes for A tags.

Consider using Keywords as the lead-in text in your paragraph instead of the name of the company. The site should rank for the company name anyway, as it is a unique string. You can use CSS to style the H1 tag like you have the company name now, and make it display: inline; instead of display: block; so it flows right into the rest of the text.

Once all that is done, then you can start building inbound links from other sites, setting up a blog, social networking pages linked in, and so forth.

@ETpro Thank you very much. If/when we move to data driven solutions with more search capability a lot of this may become more possible. In the meantime I am inserting what I can into the reference material and trying to get client to write his descriptions in a fashion that would allow relatively easy insertion in database fields. Just getting him to write them is a start. I will check for switching out firm name for more useful information. The object galleries are generated as stand-alone galleries with a JavaScript program Extreme Thumbnail. I will check to see if image descriptions have header tags in the template. Maybe I can add them if not.

As a customer if I were planning to buy something of that quality, I would want to read a full description. If they are made in the USA, be sure to emphasize that. Tell what the materials are. UL approved. etc. He needs to sell the sizzle, but he also needs to mention somewhere that it is a steak. :-)

I didn’t check the image gallery. It’s probably not going to score highly anyway, but currently most search spiders do not have a JavaScript interpreter built in, so that gallery may be a black hole to their eyes.

That is basically all the site is [image galleries] and all client has ever wanted. Any words beyond item# such-and-such have been at my instigation.

The JavaScript generates html pages, so they should be crawler-searchable—this is an image page with a ref link
http://www.artisanlamp.com/ArtisanLampPages/gallerychan/imgpages/ch000.html

OK, so the script is running server side. No problem except the lack of keyword-rich text then.

Looks like the program puts what little text there is, along with everything else, in <td> tags</td>

Is it running a script server side? I just thought it was creating the galleries as fixed data on my computer which I then upload. I have to regenerate a whole gallery if I add or remove an item.

The client would not want to pay me to research and write material for his items, with 200 or more changing annually. And, although art history research is something I do well and some information about these lamps I already know, I would want him to check them for accuracy, at least and I am not sure he would even want to do that. He really wants a customer to see a lamp and phone him with its number.

@anartist
Not to be sarcastic but “wants a customer to see lamp and PHONE him” but that is Sears Catalog. Sears stopped catalogs a long time ago.

I think the customer needs a marketing course for current times, may be at local Chamber of Commerce.

@Tropical_Willie Yes. Be sarcastic if you like but that is exactly how he feels. Early on, he used to even hate to have his email listed because he was uncomfortable with email and wanted to force his customers to phone. He has reluctantly come to accept it.
At one point I started a minor presence for him on flickr and facebook so he could post things directly but other than to have one of his staff post something to check it out has not used it. He is very old-school and English is his second language [perhaps part of the reason he is not interested in writing a lot of text]

@anartist Oh, OK. I just meant that the script wasn’t being downloaded to my machine along with a data array which is then used to write the HTML.

@Tropical_Willie I totally agree. Sometimes it comes under the heading of “The customer is always right.” At least, they need to be right till they finally wake up to what an idiot they have been.

What I want to do sooner than later, but it is beyond me, is set up a database for him so he can select his descriptors from dropdowns for various fields and attach/link the images and totally change how his site works but how to begin? Numero uno, he would not want to pay for the major redo, and numero dos I have never developed a data-driven site with cms and all that—however, once it was done, it would be so much more efficient, I think. Yes??? No???

Yes, it will be a continual albatross around your neck till it moves to a database driven site with CMS. I’m not sure that you could get enough flexibility into the content for good SEO by that high level of automation, though. It might be better to push him to learn to write.

I would hope that a gradually growing reference database [now just 6 separate short pages so no one will notice things like a jump from “I” to “S”] would take care of the SEO words issue. These are often one-of-a-kind pieces so the text would not be reused. And if he gave enough input to get basic info to appear with the photo – i could always add a little descriptive para for ones he really wanted to move, maybe???

Interesting thought. I have not seen it done. Give it a try.