Search engines use little programs called “bots” or “spiders” to crawl the web and index information about all the pages they find. How well the spiders can understand what your web pages are about has a tremendous impact on whether you can achieve good rankings.

Some web sites are constructed in ways that hinder the search engine spiders. In fact, sad as it may seem, many web designers still create websites that can’t be understood by search engine spiders at all. Could yours be one of them? Why not find out?

Check out the Spider Simulator — type in your website address and see what it looks like to the search engines. Can they read the text content on your page? Can they see the links to other pages on your website? If the answer to either of those is no or partly, your search engine rankings may be getting hurt by your web design.

A particularly egregious example is a website designed in all Flash. An example is Nature’s Equity. For this site, the Spider Simulator reports that the only text it can read is the company name and no spiderable links were found. That means the only thing the search engines can understand about this web site is the company name. All the information on their site about the company, their team, the services they offer … all of that is invisible to the search engines. That means that potential clients looking for their services can’t find them unless they already know the company name.

Are you in the same boat? Check yourself out.

Business owners often unwittingly commit one or more of five common web site mistakes that silently cost them tons of money in lost business. Read through this list and make sure you’re not making one of these mistakes.

1. Writing content that focuses on features instead of benefits. As business owners, we’re intimately close to our features. But the customer wants to know what’s in it for him or her. Those are benefits. Nail those, and you make the sale.
2. Not making your web site search engine friendly. The most egregious example of this is a snazzy, all-flash website. Beautiful, but totally unfriendly to search engines. With one of those, customers will never find you unless they already know your name. But there are less obvious mistakes of this type that are made al lot, especially with navigation the search engines can’t follow, text inside graphics where search engines can’t read it, and more.
3. Failing to keep your web site fresh. Fresh content encourages the search engines to visit you more often, and offers new opportunities to use variations on keyword phrases people are searching for. Done right, it can also act as link bait.
4. Not having a call to action. Ask your visitor to call you, to buy, to request more information. Why do you suppose at McDonalds they always ask “Do you want fries with that?” That simple call to action sells tons of fries every year.
5. Making it too hard for customers to buy from you. Don’t require a login to shop on your site. You might implement that at checkout, but far to many sites require a visitor to log in before they can ever peruse the merchandise. Bad idea!

A critical key to good rankings in the search engines is making sure the search engines can easily spider your site and index its content. We wrote about that for Entrepreneur Magazine 2½ years ago, in our article 5 Search Engine Mistakes Not to Make – critical errors that can make your site invisible on the web.