Search Engine Optimization : SEO BOOK.
Chapter
5
Creating Pages That Search Engines Love
Preparing Your Site
When creating a Web site, the first thing to consider is where to put
your site. By that, I mean the Web server and the domain name.
Finding a Hosting Company : Although many large companies place their
Web sites on their own web servers, most companies don't do this - shouldn't
do this. There's simply no way you can do it anywhere near as cheaply
and reliably as a good hosting company can do it. They place their sites
on servers owned by a hosting company. Although they have to take inconsideration
many different factors when selecting a hosting company. While looking
for a hosting company, make sure that it offers the following features:
· Allow you to upload Web pages that you have created all by
your lone some. Some services provide simple tools you can use to create
Web pages; it's fine if they provide these tools as long as you also
have the ability to create pages yourself. You must have control
over the HTML in your pages.
· Provides an access-log-analysis tool or, if you plan to use
your own analysis tool, a way to get to the raw access logs. A log-analysis
tool shows you how many people visit your site and how they get there.
· Allows you to use your own domain name. Don't get an account
in which you have a subdirectory of the hosting company's domain name.
Picking a Domain Name : Google actually reads URLs, looking for keywords
in them. For instance, if you have a Web site with the domain name rodent
- racing.com and someone searches at Google for rodent racing, Google
sees rodent-racing.com as a match. Because a dash appears between the
two words, Google recognizes the words in the domain name. If however
you use an underscore or some other character or if you run the words
together, Google doesn't see the words in the URL. So putting keywords
into the domain name and separating keywords with dashes do provide
a small benefit. Another advantage to adding dashes between words is
that it's relatively easy to come up with a domain name that's not already
taken. Furthermore, the search engines don't care what first-level domain
you use: you can have a .com, .net, .biz, .tv, or whatever; it doesn't
matter. In search engine optimization field, it has become popular to
use dashes and keywords in domain names, but the lift provided by keywords
in domain important factors when choosing a domain name :
· A domain name should be short, easy to spell, and easy to remember.
And it should pass the "radio" test. Imagine you are being
interviewed on the radio and want to tell listeners your URL. You want
something that you can say that is instantly understandable, without
having to spell it. You don't want to have to say "rodent dash
racing dash events dot com"; it's better to be able to say "rodent
racing events dot com."
· In almost all cases, you should get the .com version of a domain
name. If the .conversion is taken do not try to use the .net or .org
version for branding purposes! People remember .com, even if you say
.org or .net or whatever, so if you are planning to promote your web
site in print, on the radio, on TV, on billboards, and so on, you need
the .com version. Are keyworded domain names worth the trouble? Because
the lift provided by keywords in the domain name is rather small - and
in fact, putting too many keywords into a name can actually hurt your
placement - its probably better to focus on a single, brandable domain
name. Don't use a domain-forwarding service for Web sites you want to
turn up in the search engines. Many registrars now allow you to simply
forward browsers to a particular site. Such forwarding systems often
use the site properly. Your site should be properly configured by using
the name server settings, not a simple forward.
Understanding what a Search Engine Sees
What a search engine sees when it loads one of your pages is not the
same as what your browser sees. To understand why, you need to understand
how a Web page is created.
· A user types a URL into his browser, or clicks a link, causing
the browser to send a messages to the Web server asking for a particular
page.
· The Web server grabs the page and quickly reads it to see if
it needs to do anything to the page before sending it.
· The Web server compiles the page, if necessary.
· After the server has completed any instructions, it sends the
page to the browser.
· When the browser receives the page, it reads through the page
looking for instructions and, if necessary, further compiles the page.
· When it's finished, the browser displays the page for the user
to read.
Here are a few examples of instructions the browser may
receive:
· It may find a <SCRIPT> tag, telling it to a load a JavaScript
from another file - it must then request this file from the Server.
· It may find JavaScripts embedded into the file, in which case
it runs those scripts.
· It may find references to images or other forms o media, and
have to pull those into the page and read CSS instructions to see how
the text should be formatted.
Asp and PHP scripts are little programs that are written
into web pages. The scripts are read by a program working inassociation
with the Web server when a page is requested. The searchbots
see the results of the scripts because the scripts have been run by
the time the Web server sends the page. Server side includes
are simple statements placed into the HTML pages that name another
file and, in effect, say to the Web server, "Grab the information
in this file and drop it into the Web page here." Again, the searchbots
see the information in the SSI because the Web server inserts the information
before sending the Web page.
Understanding Keyword Concepts
Here's the basic concept: you are putting keywords into your Web pages
in such a manner that the search engines can get to them, can read them,
and will regard them as significant. The keywords you pick should be
either:
· Words near the top of the list that have many searches.
· Words lower down on the list that you feel may be worth targeting
because you have relatively few competitors.
Picking one or two phrases per page
You are going to optimize each page for one or two keyword phrases.
By optimize, to create the page in such a manner that it has a good
change of ranking well for the chosen keyword phrase or phrases, when
someone actually uses them in a search engine. You cant optimize a page
well for more than one keyword phrase at a time. The TITLE tag is one
of the most important components on a Web page, and the best position
for a keyword is right at the beginning of that tag. And only one phrase
can be placed at the beginning of the tag, right? Have a primary and
a secondary keyword phrase in mind for each page you are creating, but
also consider all the keywords you are interested in working into the
pages.
Checking For Keyword Prominence
The term prominence refers to where the keyword appears - how prominent
it is within a page component. A word near the top of the page is more
prominent than one near the bottom; a word at the beginning of a TITLE
tag is more prominent than one at the end; a word at the beginning of
the DESCRIPTION meta tag is more prominent than one at the end; and
so on.Prominence is good. If you are creating a page with a particular
keyword or keyword phrase in mind, make that term prominent - in the
body text, in the TITLE tag, in the DESCRIPTION meta tag, and elsewhere
- to convey to the search engines that the keyword phrase is important
in this particular page. Consider this title tag:
<TITLE> Everything about Rodents - Looking after Them, Feeding
Them, Rodent Racing, and more </TITLE>
When you read this, you can see that Rodent Racing is just one of several
terms the page is related to. The search engine comes to the same conclusion
because the term the page is related to. The search engine comes to
the same conclusions because the term is at the end of the title, meaning
it's probably not the predominant term. But what about the following
tag?
<TITLE>Rodent Racing - Looking after Your Rodents, Feeding them,
Everything You need to Know</TITLE>
Place Rodent Racing at the beginning of the tag places the stress on
that concept more; the search engines are likely to conclude that the
page is mainly Rodent Racing.
Watch Your Keyword Density
Another important concept is keyword density. When a user searches for
a keyword phrase, the search engine looks at all the pages contain the
phrase and checks the density - the ratio of the search phrase to the
total number of words in the page. For instance, suppose that you search
for rodent racing and the search engine finds a page that contains 400
words, with the phrase rodent racing appearing 10 times - that's a total
of 20 words. Because 20 is 5 percent of 400,the keyword density is 5
percent. Keyword density is important, but you can overdo it. If the
search engine finds that the search phrase makes up50% of the words
in the page, it may decide that the page was created purely to grab
the search engine's attention for that phrase and then ignore it. On
the other had, if the density is too low, you risk having the search
engines regard other pages as more relevant for the search.
Place Keywords Throughout Your Site
Suppose that someone searches for rodent racing, and the search engine
finds two sites that use the term. One site has a single page in which
the term occurs, and the other site has dozens of pages containing the
term. Which site will the search engine think is most relevant? The
one that has many pages related to the subject, of course. Some search
engines - such as Google - often provide two results from a site, one
indented below the other. So if your site has one page related to the
subject, this cant happen. In most cases, you are likely to grab a top
position simply by creating a single page optimized for the keyword
phrase. You may need dozens, perhaps hundreds, of pages to grab the
search engines attention.
Creating Your Web Pages
When you are creating your web pages, you need to focus on two essential
elements: They are
· Filenames: The Search Engines do get clues about the nature
of a site from the site's domain name as well as from the site's directory
structure. The added "lift" is probably not large, but every
little bit counts, right? You might as well name directories, Web pages
and images by using keywords. So e.g. rather than creating a file name
gb123.jpg, you can use a more descriptive name, such as rodent-racing-scores.
jpg. Don't have too many dashes in the filenames, though - don't use
more than a couple - because the search engine is likely to ignore the
name, if not penalize the page .You can separate keywords in a name
with dashes or periods, but not under scores. Search engines also see
the/symbol in a URL as a separator.
· Directory Structure: It may be a good idea to keep a flat directory
structure in you web site - keep your pages as close to the root domain
as possible, rather than have a complicated multilevel directory tree.
Create a directory for each navigation tab and keep all the files in
that directory. Most search engines spiders have difficulty finding
pages that are two directory levels or deeper within your site, and
many observers believe that search engines downgrade pages that are
lower down in the directory structure. This effect is probably relatively
small, but in general, you are better off using a structure with two
or three sublevels, rather than five or ten. For instance, the first
page that follows would be weighted more highly than the second page:
http://www.domainname.com/dir1/page.html
http://www.domainname.com/dir1/dir2/dir3/dir4/page.html
· The TITLE Tags: Most search engines use the site's TITLE tag
as the link and main title of the site's listing on the search results
page, TITLE tags not only tell a browser what text to display in the
browser's title bar, but they are also very important for search engines.
Searchbots read the page titles and use the information to determine
what the pages are about. If you have a keyword between your TITLE tags
competing pages don't have, you have a good chance of getting at or
near the top of the search results. The TITLE is one of the most important
components as far as search engines are concerned. However, these tags
are usually wasted because few sites bother placing useful keywords
in them. Give the search engines a really strong clue about your site's
content by using a keyword phrase in the TITLE tags. Here's how:
Place Your TITLE tags below the <HEAD> tag.
Place 40 to 60 characters between the <TITLE> and </TITLE>
tags
Put the keyword phrase you want to focus on for this page at the very
beginning of the TITLE.
Here is an example TITLE:
<TITLE> Rodent Racing Info. Rats,Mice,Gerbils,Stoats, all kinds
of Rodent Racing </TITLE>
The TITLE and often the DESCRIPTION appear on the search results page.
So your TITLE and DESCRIPTION should encourage people to visit your
site.
· The DESCRIPTION meta tag : Meta tags re special HTML tags
that can be used to carry information, which can then be read by browsers
or other programs. When search engines began, Webmasters included meta
tags in their pages to make it easy for search engines to determine
what the pages were about. Search engines also used these meta tags
when deciding how to rank the page for different keywords. The DESCRIPTION
meta tags describes the Web page to the search engines. The search engines
use this meta tags two ways:
They read and index the text in the tag.
In many cases, they use the text verbatim in the search results page.
That is, if your web is
returned in the search results page, the search engine grabs the text
from the DESCRIPTION tag
and places the text from the TITLE tag so the searcher can read your
description.
In most cases, Google doesn't use the text from the DESCRIPTION meta
tag in its search results page. Rather, Google grabs a block of text
near where it found the search keywords on the page, and then uses that
text in the results page.Using the DESCRIPTION meta tag is important
for the following reasons:
· Sometimes Google does use the DESCRIPTION you provide. If it
cant find the keywords in the page, it uses the description.
· Google, and other search engines, do index the DESCRIPTION.
· Other search engines use the DESCRIPTION tag.
The Keywords meta tag
The KEYWORDS meta tag was originally created as an indexing tool; a
way for the page author to tell search engines what the page is about
by listing, yep, keywords. Although quite important in the past, this
meta tag isn't as important these days. Some search engines do use it,
but many don't. You have a list of keywords, after all. Here are a few
points to consider:
· Limit the Tag 10 to 12 words
· You can separate each keyword with a comma and a space.
· Make sure that most of the keywords in the tag are also in
the body text.
· Don't use a lot of repitition.
· Some search engines are case sensitive, so its probably a good
idea to lowercase your keywords
· Don't use the same KEYWORD tag in all your pages.
Here's an example of a well-constructed KEYWORD tag:
<META NAME ="keywords" CONTENT="rodent racing, racing
rodents, gerbils, mice, mose, raceing, mouse, rodent races, rat races,
mouse races, stoat, stoat racing">
Other meta tags
What about other meta tags? Sometimes if you look at the source of a
page, you see all sorts of meta tags, meta tags are useful for various
reasons, but from a search engine perspective, you can forget almost
all of them.
You have heard about DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags, but also of
relevance to search engine optimization are the REVISIT-AFTER and ROBOTS
meta tags:
· REVISIT-AFTER is intended to tell search engines how often
to reindex the page. Save the electrons; don't expect search engines
to follow your instructions. Search engines reindex pages
on their own schedules.
· ROBOTS is used to block search engines from indexing pages.
But many Web authors use it to tell search engines to index a page.
Here's an example:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="ALL">
Image ALT Text
You use the <IMG> tag to insert images into Web pages. This tag
can include the ALT= attribute, which means alternative text. ALT text
was originally text that was displayed if the browser viewing the page
could not display images. These days, the Alt text is also used by programs
that speak the page. Alt tags are also read by search engines. Why?
Because these tags offer another clue about the content of the web page.
How much do Alt tags help? Almost not at all these days, because some
Web designers have abused the technique by stuffing ALT attributes with
tons of keywords. But using ALT tags cant hurt and may even push your
page up a little in the search engine rankings. You can place keywords
in your ALT attributes like this:
<IMG SRC="rodent-racing-1.jpg" ALT="Rodent Racing
- Ratty winners of our latest Rodent Racing event">
Flush the Flash Animation
Using flash animations sometimes make sense, but usually it doesn't.
many web designers place fancy flash animations on their home pages
just to make them look coo. But rarely do these animations serve any
purpose beyond making site visitors wait a little longer to get into
the site. Some search engines can now read and index Flash stuff, but
generally Flash animations don't contain any useful text fro indexing.
So if you include flash on your home page, the most important page on
your site, the page is worthless from a search engine perspective. Most
flash animations automatically forward the browser to the next page
- the real home page - after they have finished running. If you do decide
to include flash, make sure that you include a clearly visible Skip
Intro link somewhere on the page.
Don't Embeded Text in the Images
Many sites use images heavily. The overuse of images is often the sign
of an inexperienced Web designer, in particular one who is very familiar
with graphic-design tools - perhaps a graphic artist who has accidentally
un into some Web business. Such designers often create their entire
pages ina graphic-design program, including the text, and then save
images and insert them into the web page. The advantage of this approach
is that it gives the designer much more control over the appearance
of the page - and is often much faster - than using HTML to lay out
a few images and real text. But this approach has significant drawbacks.
Such pages transfer across the Internet much more slowly, and because
the pages contain no real text, the search engines don't have anything
to index.
Adding Body Text
You need text in your page. How much ? More than a little, but not too
much. May be 100 to 250 words are good. Don't get too hung up on these
numbers. The amount of content allows you to really define what the
page is about and will help the search engine understand what the page
is about. Keep in mind that a web site needs content in order to be
noticed by the search engines. If the sites have not much content for
the search engines to read, the search engine will have trouble determining
what the page is about and may not properly rank it. In effect the pages
loses points in the contest for search engine ranking. Certainly keywords
in contents are not all there is to being ranked in the search engines;
linking the pages is also very important. But keywords in content are
very significant, so the search engines have a natural bias toward websites
with a large amount of content.
Creating Headers: CSS Vs. <H> tags
Earlier the designer had no way to define what the page actually looked
like. These days, designers have a great tool available to them: Cascading
Style Sheets(CSS). With CSS, designers can define exactly what each
element should look like on a page.now here is the problem. HTML has
several tags that define headers: <H1>, <H2>, <H3>
and so on. These headers are useful in search engine optimization, because
when you put keywords into a heading, you are saying to a search engine,
"these keywords are so important that they appear in my heading
text." Search engines pay more attention to them, weighing them
more heavily than keywords in body text. But many designers have given
up on using the <H> tags and rely solely on CSS to make headers
look the way they want them to. The plain <H> tags are often rather
ugly when displayed in browsers, so designers don't like to use them.
However, there is no reasons why you cant use both <H> tags and
cascading Style Sheets, You can use style sheets two basic ways:
· Create a style class and then assign that class to the text
you want to format.
· Define the style for a particular HTML tag.
Many designers do the former; they create a style class in the style
class in the style sheet, like in the following example:
.headtext {font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size:
16px; font-weight:bold;color;#3D3D3D}
Then they assign the style class to a piece of text like this:
<DIV CLASS="headtext"> Rodent Racing for the New Millennium!</div>
Text Formatting
You can also tell the search engine that a particular word might be
significant several other ways. Here are a few things you can do to
set keywords apart from the other words on the page:
· Make the text bold.
· Make the text italic.
· Use title case for the phrase - that is, the first letter in
each word is uppercase, and the other letters are lowercase.
· Put the keywords in bullet lists.
For each page, you have a particular keyword phrase in mind; this is
the phrase for which you use the preceding techniques.
Creating Links
Links in your pages serve several purposes for the searchbots:
· They help searchbots find other pages in your site.
· Keywords in links tell search engines about the pages that
the links are pointing at.
· Keywords in links also tell the search engines about the page
containing the links.
You need link into - and out of - your pages. You don't dangling pages
- pages with links into them but no links out. All your pages should
be part of the navigation structure. But it's also a good idea to have
links within the body text, too. So when you are creating pages, create
links on the page to other pages, and make sure that other pages within
your site link back to the page you are creating , using the keywords
that you have placed in your TITLE. Don't create simple Click Here links
or you'll find More Information Here links. These words don't help you.
Instead, create links like these:
· For more information, see our rodent-racing scores page.
· Our rodent-racing background page will provide you the information
you're looking for.
· Visit our rat events and mouse events pages for more info.
Links are critical. Web developers have played all sorts of tricks with
keywords - overloading TITLE tags, DESCRIPTION tags, ALT attributes
and so on, - and all these tricks are well known to the search engines
and don't do much anymore. The search engines constantly look for new
ways to analyze and index pages, and link text is a good way for them
to do that. In the same way that it's hard for a web designer to manipulate
a TITLE tag - because search engines can easily spot overloading - it's
difficult to manipulate link text.
Using Other Company And Product Names
Here's a common scenario. Many of your prospective visitors and customers
are searching online for other companies' names, or the names of products
produced or sold by other companies. Can you these names in your pages?
Yes but be careful how you use them. Many large companies are aware
of this practice, and a number of lawsuits have been file that relate
to the use of keywords by companies other than the trademark owners.
E.g. Playboy Enterprises sued Web sites that were using the terms playboy
and playmates through out their pages, site names, domain names and
meta tags to successfully boost their positions. Not surprisingly, Playboy
won.
So, yes, you can get sued. But then again, you can get sued for anything.
If you use product and company names to mislead or misrepresent, you
could be in trouble. But you can use the terms in a valid, non fraudulent
manner. For instance, you can have a product page in which you compare
your products to another, named competitor. Just stuffing a competitor's
name into the KEYWORDS tag wont do much for your search engine ranking,
although some companies drop competitor's names into the body text in
a totally irrelevant way. The bigger debate is the question of whether
companies should be allowed to buy keywords related to competing products
and companies.
Preparing For Local Search
Some search engines are adding local search capabilities, and such tools
will become much more important in the future. Search brings up pages
from yellow pages sites and directories of various kinds, but if you
have, a retail brick and mortar business, you should try to optimize
your pages to give them a chance to appear in such searches. Here are
a few ways todo that:
· Include your full address in your Web pages. Although you could
put the address in the footer, it's better toput it near the top of
the page somewhere.
· Find other reasons to mention the city and zipcode in the body
of your text and if possible <H> tags; use bold font on some of
the references too.
· Include the full address in your TITLE and DESCRIPTION meta
tags.
Creating Navigation Structures that Search Engines Can read
Your navigation structure needs to be visible to the search engines.
Here are a few tips for search-engine-friendly navigation.
· If you use Javascript navigation, or some other technique that
is invisible, make sure that you have a plain HTML navigation system,
too, such basic text links at the bottom of your pages.
· Even if your navigation structure is visible to search engines,
you may want to have these bottom-of-page links as well. They are convenient
for site visitors and provide another chance for the search engines
to find your other pages.
· Add a site map page and link to it from your main navigation.
It provides another way for search engines to find all your pages.
· Whenever possible, provide keywords in text links as part of
the navigation structure.
Blocking Searchbots
You may want to block particular pages, or even entire areas of your
Web site, from being indexed. Here are a few examples of pages or areas
you may want to block:
· Pages that are under construction.
· Pages with information that is mainly for internal use.
· Directories in which you store scripts and CSS style sheets.
Using the ROBOTS meta tag or the robots.txt file, you can tell the search
engines to stay away. The meta tag looks like this:
<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="noindex , nofollow">
This tag does two thing: noindex means don't index this page, and nofollow
means don't follow the links from the page.
