Unfriendly
Search Elements
Search
engines have a limited amount of information types that they can actually
see. For instance if your site has an image on it that has the heading
“The Worlds Greatest Widget”, the search engine has no idea what your
graphic says. All it sees is that there is an image file loading on
the page. Likewise for Macromedia Flash files,
audio, animation and some dynamic content. If your site incorporates
these elements as a primary means to deliver content that would otherwise
be text, you are hindering the search engines abiblity
to read the information.
There
are certain ways to get around some of these limitations. For instance
your HTML editor should allow you to enter whats known as an ALT Tag on your image. You have probably
seen these before and not even known what they are. Before an image
loads on the page sometimes you will see a few words describing what
the image is or what it contains. These are text references that are
linked to the image in the HTML code of the page. These tags are the
primary way a search engine can tell what an image is. By using these
tags and including your keywords in them you greatly increase the
search engines ability to index your site. Back to out illustration
earlier, I would suggest that if it is possible to use a large, bold
font for you “Worlds Greatest Widget” line that is better than using
an image with an ALT Tag, the reason is that search engines assign
a higher value to large text at the top of your page than to an ALT
Tag of an image.
Ins
and Outs of Search Friendly Text
Search
engines all have their own techniques to ranking pages but these are
some great things to do that will help your rankings and are beneficial
to site visitors when properly implemented. As I mentioned about engines
give a higher rank to larger font sized and bold words. The premise
is that if you have a heading at the top of your page that talks about
baseball and the word baseball is very large and used in a heading
format, the engine will assume your page has a good bit to do with
baseball. Search engines also give higher values to words that are
in bold throughout the site. When the engines index your site they
work of a concept called keyword density. The idea behind keyword
density is to determine how many times a word occurs in a page. For instance, if you have the term baseball occurring 15 times on
my page that will increase the chance of being listed under baseball.
Beware many engines look for suspicious keyword density and will consider
it spamming if your keyword appears too many times. You cannot just
submit a site with the word baseball 200 times and expect to get a
good listing. Infact many site can intelligently determine if it is used
in a sentence and sentence structure, to some degree. Do not try to
get around these protocols, they are very good and are in place to
ensure the search engine is serving up relevant content. Remember
it’s the engines job to deliver relevant sites to searcher.
One
other topic worth mention is properly worded Title Tags. These tags
are the titles that the HTML page has and also what is displayed when
the page is bookmarked. Search Engines give a certain weight to the
words in the title. When developing your page you will want to incorporate
your keywords into the page title. Many times the engines will use
the title as part of the search listing in the engine itself. So use
a title that will represent your content and be worded well. Do not
use keyword spamming on this as the engines can detect if you simple
repeat the same keywords over and over.
Another
item to keep in mind is that the engines like to see a decent amount
of content. If an engine sees 50 words on a page it will likely not
rank very well. On average you should aim for 200-300 words on a page.
This will ensure the engines deem your site informative. The proper
balance between the amount of content, keyword density and use of
bold large headings with your keywords will give you a good chance
when it comes to optimizing text.
How
to Organize Your Site
Search
Engines actually look at how your site is organized and how your pages
link together is very important. When designing your site you should
title each page using your keywords. For instance, if your page is
on farming you will want to name your actual HTML page “farming.html”.
Using this technique search engines will actually use the page name
to help determine relevancy over generic names like “page1” or “summary”.
In
closing these are some of the concepts and ideas you must keep in
mind when developing you site. Look at search optimization as a test
you would take in school. This test has many questions that if you
answer them correctly will add up to a good score. This score will
relate to a higher position in the search engines. If you learn these
techniques and learn to use them while you are building a site, you
will have a much better chance of getting a good listing.
