How to make a graphically rich web site search engine friendly

Some folks might know that we started our own ebook publishing company and the big announcement will be at Emerald City Comic Con on the 13th of March 2010. What has been interesting though is as we have been busy building the web site, we are working a lot with Google Web Master tools, guidelines, and the Web Master Checklist in building the site because it is graphically rich.

About 80% of the web site is going to be images, as we are offering a free cover browser, free to read online comics that are copyright expired or have moved into the public domain as a way to show our work and the things that can be done with Amazon DTP, PDF’s, and then just skimming through the comic books online. When dealing with a graphically rich web site, having enough text for the search engines to bite into so that they can spider the site is very important. According to Google, these are the types of files that Google can scan:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (.pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (.ps)
• Atom and RSS feeds (.atom, .rss)
• Autodesk Design Web Format (.dwf)
• Google Earth (.kml, .kmz)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (.wk1, .wk2, .wk3, .wk4, .wk5, .wki, .wks, .wku)
• Lotus WordPro (.lwp)
• MacWrite (.mw)
• Microsoft Excel (.xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt)
• Microsoft Word (.doc)
• Microsoft Works (.wks, .wps, .wdb)
• Microsoft Write (.wri)
• Open Document Format (.odt)
• Rich Text Format (.rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (.swf)
• Text (.ans, .txt)
• Wireless Markup Language (.wml, .wap)
Source: Google

Nowhere in there is JPG, PNG, or GIF files that we are using. Therefore, this has required a liberal use of the tag to describe the image. While we are not interested in “keyword stuffing” because of its negative effects, what we are interested in is describing the picture. So our alt tag looks something like this and that seems to be in line with the expectations of Google, meaning it will work with just about any search engine. The other part of this was to make sure each page has a title, and that the title was SEO friendly. We are also using a lot of meta tags throughout the site to help search engines spider the site better.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of designing and developing a graphically rich web site, in that the use of with good descriptors, and the use of Meta Tags are about the only real way of giving search engines enough information to spider, without distracting the reader from the content on the page, which is a scanned image of a comic book page. If there are other ways of doing this, drop a note below, it would be interesting to hear other people’s experiences in designing a graphically rich web site that is search engine friendly.

(Cross-posted @ TechWag )