Last Updated - 21 Oct 2002
This document assumes that you are happy to look at the actual code of the html, or xhtml which is being produced. If not, I recommend that you look at the actual html and attempt to understand it, before attempting to improve it.
A co-ordinated approach is required to become accurately ranked by search engines, only through use of all the methods recommended can improvements be gained over multiple different search methods.
It is important when developing a marketing strategy to ascertain who the audience is, where, how, and if they will be searching for your site or product. A set of relevant keywords should be dervived early on and woven in throughout as outlined below. Be as accurate as you can be for your chosen audience.
Traffic can come from many sources:
Once you have traffic you need to make your visitors feel welcome by providing a fast loading, intuitive website which is accessible, and front load your information so that visitors find what they want, fast.
To keep your visitors your need to communicate with them, or help them communicate with each other. In other words help them feel that they belong. Use membership, and encourage it by giving members added functionality, news, priviledges etc.
Meta tags are used to embed "hidden" information about a document and must be placed within the <head> of the document
A meta tag may look like this - <meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2">
<meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2">
It is crucial to carefully consider what key words will be used to search for your page.
<meta name="description" content="A concise description goes here">
Use a short, concise and accurate description of the page or sites content and purpose, using keywords early on. This text sometimes appears in the search results, make it look good. 250 characters maximum, 20-30 recommended.
The page title, description, and first search matching content often appear together on search engine results, spell and punctuate well. It is important that the results display correct and appealing information, even if already rated highly. This turns high ranking into visitors.
The page title must go in the <head> of the document and be of the form
<title>Title goes here</title>
The title very often appears in search results and should be short, concise and accurate, preferably including 2 or 3 keywords.
In some search engines the first few sentences of content, or the sentences matching the search terms are shown as search results. This should be easily readable and contain plenty of keywords. Any content driven search engine will rank you highly if it finds plenty of keywords within the page's content. Use of lots of text keywords printed in the same colour as the background and made extremely small is considered spam by some search engines. After all, good content is what the search engines are after...
Links with keywords in can attract search engine attention. It is advisable to build up a site map of text links and link back to it on every page. This encourages spidering. Hidden or visible links across multiple sites encourages spidering and ranking.
Headings (<h2> <h3> etc.) with keywords in can attract search engine attention
Use alt attributes in img tags giving a short concise description of the image including a keyword. 15-20 words recommended maximum.
Javascript content on this website has been cached within certain search engines. It is not easy to ascertain which ones and how, but random content produced by a .js file has appeared in search engine phrases. This obviously has implications for embedding search information in .js files. I have always understood that search engine spiders were not javascript aware, so a small experiment is being conducted in the html here.
Results will be published as soon as the log files show a result....
It is not known yet whether search engine spiders ignore html comments of the form <!-- --> but this page will attempt to do some experimentation within the html following this.
Results will be published as soon as the log files show a result....
It is possible to learn the techniques of a specific search engine and then create a page aimed at it, i.e. index_yahoo.html, index_google.html - sometimes called a "portal page". Then submit this portal page to the relevant search engine instead of the standard home page, or as a link to the required page. By using the search engine to search for your site you can then tailor the portal page for best results. Porn sites often employ this technique successfully.
Optimise first, then submit. Wallets Beware - the ones that get you to fill out big forms, they usually want to charge you. An email address and url should be sufficient. Be prepared to wait up to six weeks, unless you want to pay. In general it is only nescessary, and desirable, to submit to major search engines (presuming you want quality hits not just spider visits!). At update time these include:
From experience, it is quicker to get a search engine to spider a page by getting a link to the page from a website which is already spidered by that search engine. Thus once you have one page which is routinely spidered, linking from this page to new pages will enable them much faster spidering. Google presently spider this page every week.
Framesets can complicate search engine rating significantly.
One workaround for this is outlined at http://www.searchmechanics.com/learn/srf/srf.htm involving the use of javascript.
Putting a link to the home page of your site on every framed page allows users following an "out of frame context" link to load the frameset.
A non-javascript workaround is to use a "splash" or "portal" page. Make a non-frames front page optimised for search engine placement, which then offers people a link inside your frames website. More than one portal page can be used to specifically target individual methods of searching.
Search engine spiders are not generally javascript enabled, thus they will not successfully spider the website.
An important workaround is to provide a text link site map, which is linked to from the front page and all pages within the site. This allows a robot to spider the site fully.
Flash, many browser plugins, and other <object>s are not readable by search engine spiders, so ensure that all the above methods are used before plugins are used.
By regularly viewing the website statistics or log files, it should be possible to fine tune your strategy further. Depending on your web statistics, or ability to examine the log files you should be able to determine where on the planet your audience is, what operating system and browser they are using, what pages they visited, the links they followed to get to the page, or the search engine they used, and the search phrases used - these can all be very useful.
In the log files, errors may show up also, such as 404 not found (if relevant - not forgetting some will be scans), and should be fixed to speed up, and aid accessibility to your pages or site.
Author: sinister@computertorture.com - please send feedback.
