Jul202005Search Engine Optimization Revisited
My last post talked about one of the key ingredients to high-placement in search engine results—in-bound links. The more sites that link to you, the more popular your site is, and the higher your SERP—search engine rank position. I also suggested that your Google Page Rank is a good determinant of that. Unfortunately, I appear to be wrong.
Last week I attended Web Visions 2005, a yearly conference dedicated to analysing, promoting and understanding the Web. One session, “Search Engine Optimization and Web Standards” presented by SEO expert Alan K’necht provided clear insight into how search engines work, and what you can do to make your sites more “search engine friendly.” First, apparently the Google Page Rank is neat and all, but has little relation to your placement in the search results.
However, he did make some very important points about what helps and what doesn’t help improve your search engine attraction factor. Here are a few rules of thumb (circa July 2005.)
What helps:
- Words, words, words. Search engines eat them up, index them, and use them to judge the value of your site. In fact, the ratio of actual content to other coder fluff like CSS, JavaScript code and excessive HTML tags, is important. Search spiders don’t always index and entire page, so you need as much textual content available as possible. Ideally 40-50% of a page should be text.
- The position of words. Words at the top of the page are given more weight than your concluding paragraphs.
- Emphasized words. Believe it or not, adding bold or italics around a word, not only gives it more emphasis for your human readers, but it’s also important to search bots. But don’t over do it. You’ll be penalized if EVERYTHING is bold on a page.
- Make the page title descriptive. Too often, a page’s title will be generic—a company’s name, for example —instead of descriptive of the page’s content—”How to build a sand castle.”
- Use the <h1> tag. Use an <h1> tag, but ONLY one, on a page. Also place it very near the beginning of the page, and make sure it’s descriptive too. Using other headers too, like <h2> and <h3> to organize sections of your page is also a good idea.
- Meta-tag: description. A description of your page is used when your page is listed in search engine results. But it’s also analyzed by search bots to get an understanding of the page. Keep it short and descriptive.
- In-bound links. Obviously. You need other sites to link to your site.
- Site architecture. Apparently, search engines put some value to directory and file names, so they should be descriptive of the content they contain. In addition avoid using more than 2 dashes in a file name.
- Make links descriptive. Don’t use “click here” for link text. Use words that clearly indicate what the link leads to: for example, “directions to AAA Co.”
What doesn’t help
- Flash. Search bots don’t index Flash movies. Some can crawl Flash movies and follow links within them, but they don’t read the words contained in the Flash movies.
- Meta-tag: keywords. Keyword metatags were once used by search engines. But, saavy Web masters learned they could increase a page’s SERP, by adding words that weren’t even related to a page’s content inside the keyword meta-tag. Now most search engines ignore these.
- Graphics. Search-engines can’t read text in a graphic (think navigation buttons), nor do they read the “alt” property either.
- Deeply nested tables. If you’re still designing your site with lots and lots of tables within tables. It’s time to get on the CSS-tip and change how you layout your pages.
- Lots of code. Any code you can place in an external file, like CSS stylesheets or JavaScript routines, should go in an external file.
- Font tags. These just add code and get in the way. Switch to CSS now!
- Cookies. If your site depends on cookies to function, a search bot may skip right by.
- Forms. If you require people to fill out a form to access parts of your site, you’re guaranteeing that those areas of the site WON’T be indexed by search engines.
- Too many parameters in a URL. If your web-site is all tricked out with the latest and greatest database-driven, server-side magic, be careful that it doesn’t produce URLs like www.example.com/?id=948578978129&name=bob&sessionID=84787837&this=that. Many search engines steer clear of this unfriendly URLs. There are solutions for unfriendly URLs.
These are a handful of the tips from Alan’s session. Keep in mind that Search Engine Optimization is an ever shifting target. The major search engines are always refining the algorithms they use to determine which sites should win the search wars, so these tips (good in July 2005), may be obsolete in 2006. For more information on SEO, you can find SEO resources on Alan’s site.
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