Just as Teflon prevents food from sticking to your pan, there are things that you can do to make the search engines slide off your web pages. Not that you want to, but you may have done it inadvertently.

If you want to be visible to the search engines, ensure that you don't rely on any of the five following things in the way that you've built your site, because they can be potentially disastrous:

• dynamic urls
• frames
• javascript navigation
• image map navigation
• flash.

We're not saying you can never use these techniques, but if search engine results matter to you, then it would be best to avoid them. At the very least, use them judiciously, and know that you're causing yourself extra work.

Dynamic URLs

These are the kinds of URLs (uniform resource locators) or web addresses that have weird characters in them, usually one of these:

?, &, %, +, =, $, cgi-bin, .cgi.

They are the result of database-driven sites or a site that uses scripts. If you can't get the database to churn out urls that are search engine friendly, at the very least built a few static pages that you can optimize for the search engines.

Frames

Frames are not indexed well, usually because there is very little content on the first thing that loads, the frameset. The other frames that your audience can see and read are separate files that the search engine might not bother to read after it has found little content on the frameset.

Javascript Navigation

Search engine spiders - the technology that crawls through your webpages, following link to link - are unable to follow links within a javascript. So if the only way your visitors can move around your website is through javascript menus, then you have a problem.

Fix it by having a redundant text-only navigation bar at the bottom of your website, or a comprehensive site map that you link to from every page (without javascript, of course).

Image Map Navigation

Similar to the issue with javascripts, except in this case, the spiders can get trapped in the code you will create for an image map. You can fix this by using standard html links instead of the image map, or again, by creating a text-only form of navigation.

Flash

Unlike some people, we don't think Flash is 99% bad, but we do think it is often misused on websites, resulting in search engine invisibility.

One problem is similar to the issue with image maps and javascript navigation: sites that use flash for the main navigation will get missed because the search engine spiders does not recognize Flash links.

The other issue that we see all the time are websites that are built entirely of Flash, so in addition to the navigation issue, there is no actual text for the search engine to read. Search engines live on text, and if they don't see any on your site, they will not recognize your website.

If you think you may have sprayed some search engine teflon on your website, then contact me to see if we can help you get Google to stick again.