PART 4

Helping the search engines along

You must help the search engines find their way through your site and webpages.

Search engines are blind to design and pictures. Basically they read text and text only. This is why all good search engine optimizer knows how to give them content rich text filled with relevant keywords.

Fortunately, this does not mean that you will have to stick to boring and bland webpages. As long as you know what you are doing, you may combine efficient search engine marketing and daring design.

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From a search engine optimization perspective, the perfect webpage has no graphics, no javascript code, no tables; it uses no special plug-ins and contains a lot of normal, readable text.

Study the Competition

It does not hurt to study successful pages of sites related to your own. When using a browser such as Explorer or Firefox select “View,” then “Source”. The browser will show the HTML code of that page.

From the Lost Apocrypha of Search Engine Marketing:

"I don't know what to do," Mary said. "I fix my hair, wear pretty dresses, and smile charmingly, but they do not notice me, all the same."

"Aaah," Petronella answered, "they do not care about your good looks! They only look for your inner qualities, you know, your thoughts, your feelings, your knowledge and wit."

"You must be joking!" Mary laughed.

"No, it's true," Petronella said earnestly. "The search engines look for content, content and even more content. Give them a large number of webpages filled with useful information, and you are the queen of the ball!"

PANDIA SEARCH CENTRAL

Search engines and Web design

Moving text to the top

From a search engine optimization perspective, the perfect webpage has no graphics, no javascript code, no tables; it uses no special plug-ins and contains a lot of normal, readable text.

From a designer’s point of view such pages are, however, painfully boring. We need that logo! Illustrations liven up the page and tables give you control over the layout. Don't worry. There are ways around this problem.

Nevertheless, If it is in any way possible, include you keyword phrases in normal text at the very top of the page, using a relatively small -- but clearly visible -- font size if necessary. If your design does not allow that, do at least include the phrase in image ALT-tags. Reduce the number of images and elements before the main body text as much as possible.

The navigation problem

Readers are used to having the navigation menu to the left of the page. However, if you put the menu in the left hand column of a table, all the text in that column will appear before the regular text in the HTML code.

There are several ways of solving this problem. You could, for instance, move the navigation list to the right).

The design of our Goalgetter Web Search Tutorial is another. If you look carefully at the code behind those pages, you'll see that the text in the left hand column appears after the main center column text in the HTML code!

You may also use CSS and position webpage elements by exact positioning. However, it is harder to make such pages look good in all relevant browsers.

Or you may just let it rest. We tried to force our Wordpress blog software to put the main content first, and found that life was too short!

Frames

Sites using framesets (loading different pages into different sections of the browser window) have usually been in deep trouble, as search engines have listed the frameset page only. This means that none of the content pages are listed.

The trick has therefore been to include a keyword rich text in the <NOFRAMES> tag in the frameset file. The <NOFRAMES> tag lets you imbed a separate webpage to be read by surfers that are using browsers that are unable to interpret frames. Search engines that are not spidering the framed pages will normally read this text.

Fortunately more and more search engines are able to follow the links included in the frameset. As far as we can see Yahoo!, Google and MSN can now find framed content pages on a frame-based website.

On the other hand, this means that they will normally ignore the frameset page. Hence the <NOFRAMES>-portion of the frameset page will no longer give a good ranking in these search engines.

Instead you must optimize each and every one of the framed pages. This is actually a good thing, as you can use these pages as doorway pages focusing on one keyword phrase only.

There is one problem, though. The search engines will present a link to the framed pages, not to the frameset itself, which means that your visitors may find themselves stranded on an orphaned page, without navigation tools. You should therefore use a javascript that automatically loads the complete frameset.

The following works well in most browsers. The script is included in the tag of all framed content pages:

<BODY onLoad="if (parent.frames.length==0) top.location='http://www.yoursite.com/
subdirectory/frameset.html';">

Change the address (frameset.html is the frameset file). Note that you may submit the framed content pages individually to search engines that do not resolve framesets.

Directory Structure

Note that the level of the directory where the page is found is important. Higher is considered more important. If the page is buried too deep, the crawler may not go that far and will never find it.

This means that www.yoursite.com/index.html will have a better chance than www.yoursite.com/topic/
subtopic/subsubtopic/index.html. Avoid more than two sub-directory levels.

Linkmaps

It is quite possible to submit all your pages to the search engines. Some of them, however, prefer to find your pages themselves. Google will do so, provided it finds a place to start or you give it your home page URL.

The major search engines may give a higher boost to pages they find by themselves, at least on the short term. This is why you should include links to as many pages as possible, not only on your home page, but also on all pages. By doing so, you ensure that the search engine will find as much of your site as possible, wherever it enters the site.

There are limits to how many links you can include on a page, of course, especially if you have a large site. If this is the case, you should make a site map or “hallway page” presenting all sections of your site and including links to most of the pages. Make sure that you include descriptions of the various sections, as search engines like links embedded in normal text. Moreover, your visitors will thank you for it, as it makes it easier to navigate your site.

Flash and image maps

The worst you can do, search engine wise, is to design a home page with no links at all.

Remember, most search engines do not understand Flash. Hence they cannot follow links embedded in your cool Flash intro.

A Flash-only page has no regular text, so there will be nothing for the search engine to base its ranking on. And even the search engines that do follow Flash links, find it hard to make sense out of what the pages are about. Meta tags are not enough.

Search engines also find it hard to follow links in image maps. If you do use Flash or image maps, make sure you include regular links as well, for instance near the bottom of the page. These will also be of help to visually impaired people and others who are unable to use these technologies.

Spam

One way of including many links on a page, without making the page look crowded, is to hide them, for instance by including 1x1 pixel images that link to hidden pages. This is a popular technique among some search engine "experts" who want to include links to so-called doorway pages that are not be accessed by regular visitors.

Some also put in links with no link text, like this:

<A HREF="hiddenpage.html"></A.>

Again, these are not techniques we would recommend. The way the search engines feel about spam these days, they are bound to do something about this as well. And remember, if one of your competitor reports your spamming to the search engines, it is very likely that the search engines will punish you!

The following techniques may also lead to your site being banned from many of the major search engines.

Redirect pages that use meta-tags or javascript to immediately load a new page. If you need to use redirects, make sure to include a NOINDEX metatag to tell the search engine not to index this page.

Large amount of keyword rich tiny text (FONT SIZE=”1” or relevant CSS tag) near the end of the page.

Keyword stuffing or spamdexing is the repetition of the keyword phrase over and over again. You must work phrases into regular sentences!

Invisible text is text rendered in the same color as the webpage background. White text <FONT COLOR=”#FFFFFF”> on a white (#FFFFFF) background is considered spam, as are small deviations from the same color, as in <FONT COLOR=”#EEEEEE”> or <FONT COLOR=”#EFEFEF”>. The font must be clearly visible for the average viewer.

Note that the search engine spiders do not see tables. Hence a white font in a table with a black background may be considered spam if the page background is white.

(CSS experts may find it tempting to use an external style sheet to hide the code that gives some of the text the same color as the background. As far as we know, search engines are at the moment unable to discover such a trick automatically. However, they will probably do so in the future, and if the search engine staff decides to control your site manually -- for instance because of a tip -- they will find it. Furthermore, do not exclude the css-file from search engine spiders by using the robots.txt file. That will make them suspect foul play.)

GO TO THE NEXT PAGE;on link popularity and reciprocal linking >>>

Contents

1 Search Engine Marketing 101
2 Selecting Search Keywords
3 Search Engine Friendly Code
4 Search Engine Friendly Web Design
5 Link Popularity
6 Search Engine Submissions

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