Does seach engines, find text that is not visible on the page.

[jambiani]

I have a homepage www.zanzibar-guesthouse.dk i would like to write some
words so seach engines can find the page, but i would like my homepage
to be without words?

Can i write text/keywords on the page in comment or in a other way, so
it is not visible, and the seach engines still can seach the page in
the text on the page.

My web CEO program says "Your page has too few words! We recommend that
it have 113 to 1320 words instead of 7 words"

Regards.
Martin.

 

[David Dorward]

Can i write text/keywords on the page in comment or in a other way, so
it is not visible, and the seach engines still can seach the page in
the text on the page.

Make pages for users, not for search engines. Don't deceive your users or
present different content to search engines than you display to users,
which is commonly referred to as "cloaking."

-- http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

 

[Harlan Messinger]

I have a homepage www.zanzibar-guesthouse.dk i would like to write some
words so seach engines can find the page, but i would like my homepage
to be without words?

Can i write text/keywords on the page in comment or in a other way, so
it is not visible, and the seach engines still can seach the page in
the text on the page.

My web CEO program says "Your page has too few words! We recommend that
it have 113 to 1320 words instead of 7 words"

Search engines ignore comments. (Otherwise people could just add all
kinds of terms that have nothing to do with their site, to get hits from
people who are looking for something else.)

If your page has only seven words--well, exactly. Your page can't be
about all that much, and whatever it is about, it has almost nothing to
say on the subject. To people looking for material on that subject, it
won't be as useful as a lot of other pages with much more content on the
same subject. It wouldn't make sense for a search engine to rank it highly.

 

[Adrienne Boswell]

I have a homepage www.zanzibar-guesthouse.dk i would like to write some
words so seach engines can find the page, but i would like my homepage
to be without words?

What if a blind person would is looking for a guest house? Zanzibar
sounds exciting, so they click on your link. What do they find?
Nothing. At least if there were some text there, they would be able to
find something out.

The same is true of someone who knows absolutely nothing about your site.
They want to know where Zanzibar is, what kind of activities are
available, where and what kind of restaurants are there, how much things
cost. You can give them that information, and if you do a good job, they
will come to your establishment because you were able to help them, even
before they got there. That's good customer service.

Can i write text/keywords on the page in comment or in a other way, so
it is not visible, and the seach engines still can seach the page in
the text on the page.

No. Not without getting blacklisted. Any why would you want to? See
above.

My web CEO program says "Your page has too few words! We recommend that
it have 113 to 1320 words instead of 7 words"

It's right. The image is lovely, very inviting, but give no information
about it.

 

[Andy Dingley]

I have a homepage www.zanzibar-guesthouse.dk i would like to write some
words so seach engines can find the page, but i would like my homepage
to be without words?

Ignoring search engines for the moment and just thinking of human
users, why should "your homepage be without words"?

The homepage is crucial, in many ways the most important page on the
site. So why not place words on it? If you're taking an _aesthetic_
view of things and saying that the first page should just be one
beautiful image, then that's a good approach _for_print_media_. On the
web though it's called a "splash page" and it's generally agreed now
that although they used to be popular, they're not a good usability
feature. If you really want to have one, call it "splash.htm" and
handle it accordingly. The homepage that is what people bookmark and
what the web robots find should be content-rich, not just pretty.