Search Engine-friendly site or Visitor-friendly site – which is more important for crawling and indexing

Last week I had a discussion regarding link exchange in a platform. One member criticized that my blog is only text based and having no image, flash or video content to discuss a topic more effectively. Images make a blog/site visitor- friendly as well as aesthetic look.

Yes, I am agreeing that through an image or video, a topic can be discussed more clearly and visitors may prefer it for better understand. An image or picture is equal to 100 pages of writing. From the point of regular visitors image is important. But if we keep Search Engines and tips how google crawls a site in our mind, text based content is search engine-friendly because search engines index pages on the basis of text and maximum visitors search with words. In this regard we have to keep in mind the important point of webmaster guidelines where we have read that publishers should make site for visitors, not for search engines. One should not make a site keeping in mind the search engines only. Frequently use of a keyword is one of the important tip of SEO but frequent using of key words without reason just for search engine optimization will kick you off from the index and your site will be black listed.

So, if you are able to express your topic clearly through text using appropriate density of key words, it is not bad. You should take utmost care while writing the title of the page. Your title should be as far as possible descriptive; so that it helps search engines know the topic of your page you are writing for. I have already discussed about the usage of hyphens between keywords.

If you are using images, flash or other multimedia in a page make sure your page has textual descriptions to make it search engine-friendly. Site with dark colors and images take too much time to upload and visitors may skip to another site and you will loose your genuine visitors. But it is good idea to add a picture where it is essential to describe the topics for making your site visitor-friendly. Just for aesthetic look, images should be avoided.