|
 Since the spiders see your page as HTML code instead of what is directly visible on your HTML pages, optimizers must gain a solid understanding of the structure of a typical HTML document as well.
This lesson will guide you through some HTML basics and then tell you which elements are critical for optimization and why.
First, we recommend that your HTML documents comply with the XHTML standard. XHTML is the strictest standard of the HTML (hypertext markup language). By following this pattern, you ensure your pages are easily readable for search engine spiders. You can learn more about XHTML at the official resource of the World Wide Web consortium: http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ Every HTML document that complies with the standards has two principal sections: the HEAD area and the BODY area. To illustrate this, we can open a source code of any HTML page found on the Web. A good example is http://www.w3.org/. Open this in your browser, right-click on the page and select "view page source" or "view source". The HEAD section is everything you see between the <head> and </head> tags. The content of this section is invisible when viewing the page from a browser. As you can see, one of the elements it includes is the title tag (between the <title> and </title> markup). This is what is shown in the caption bar of the internet browser when this page is displayed in a browser. The title will also represent your page in the search engine results. As such, the title tag is a very important element. The head section also includes various META tags. In the w3.org example we see the META keywords tag and the META description tag: <meta name="keywords" content="…"> <meta name="description" content="…"> We will come back often to these tags as we work through the optimization process, as they are an important part of properly “feeding the spiders”, when done correctly. After the <head> tag is closed, the <body> tag opens. Everything that's within the body tag (i.e. between the <body> and </body> markup) is visible on the page when viewed in the browser. In the body text of the w3c.org example, we see the <h1> and <h2> tags. These are called HTML headings and range from the 1st (h1) to the 6th (h6) level; initially, they were meant to mark logical styles for different level of heading importance: "h1" being the most important heading and "h6" being the least important. Usually, browsers will display the tags from largest to smallest. The <h1> tag displayed with the largest font size, and on down respectively until <h6> displayed with the smallest font size. The search engines treat the heading tags the same way. The links tag is another important body element, and is delimited by <a> and </a> markup. The image tag <img> is responsible for displaying an appropriate image whenever a browser sees it in the source code. Schematically, an HTML document in an optimizer's eyes (as well as in the search engine's eyes) looks like this: <head> <title>My title goes here</title> <meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3"> <meta name="description" content="site description"> </head> <body> <h1>This is the first level heading which is important to the search engines</h1> <h2>this is a kind of subheading which is also important</h2> This is a simple text in the body of the page. This content must include a minimum of 100 words, with keyword density around 3% to 7%, maximum keyword prominence to the beginning, middle and end of the page, and maximum keyword proximity. <b>This text will show in bold</b> <a href="http://www.somesite.com" title="some widget site">Link to some widget site</a> <img src="http://mysite.com/image.jpg" alt="and this is my image" /> </body> Let's go through all the HTML elements and get an in-depth insight into how we can optimize each of them. The title tag The Title tag of your Web page is probably the most important HTML tag. Not only will the search engines consider it when estimating your pages' relevancy towards certain keywords, but also when your title tag finally shows up in the SERP (search engine result pages). A lot will depend on how attractive the title is to Web surfers and whether they are compelled to click on your link. All the search engines consider the keywords in this tag and generally give those keywords a lot of importance in their ranking system. Always use your primary keywords in the title tag at least once. Try to place them at the start of the tag, i.e. make their prominence 100%. The minimum keyword prominence for the title is 60%. Don't use several title tags on one page. Make sure the title is the first tag in the head section, that there are no tags before it. Avoid listing the same keyword multiple times in the tag , some engines may penalize for this. Avoid using the same title throughout your site. Try using a unique title tag for each web page and use key phrases that are thematically relevant to that page. You can use variant forms of a keyword when possible or applicable. For instance, if you use "Designer" in your Title tag, a search on "design" will give you a match on most engines. However, words like "companies" will not always yield a match on "company" since "company" is not an exact substring of "companies". Longer titles are generally better than shorter ones, however the recommended word count for title is only 5 to 12 words, and character length up to 75 symbols. Make your title interesting and appealing to searchers to convince them why they should click on it. Here are 10 tips for title tags given by John Alexander, a prominent search engine expert: - "When working with your keyword phrase, get it positioned up front so that as you build a sentence it still reads well.
- Try working with your one important keyword phrase up front and another secondary phrase to the rear of the title.
- Try writing your title to make a thought provoking statement.
- Try writing your title so that it asks a "thought provoking" question.
- Try writing a title so that reveals a hidden truth or misconception.
- While in creative mode, keep your mind on what it is that your target audience really wants.
- Build honest titles that are related to your site content.
- Do NOT resort to keyword stuffing or stacking the title full of multiple phrases that do not convey an intelligent message.
- Do not include a lot of capitals or special characters in your title.
- Do not get hung up on title length. The easiest rule is to simply keep your title under 59 characters (for Lycos sake) and honestly, you can build really excellent titles in this space."
The META tags There are two META tags that appear to be of use by most of the search spiders: META keywords and META description. If you use any other META tags, place them after these two. The META Keywords Syntax: <meta name="keywords" content="keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 3, …" /> Its initial purpose was to give the search engine robots an idea of what the page is about to help with rankings. Unfortunately, as soon as this became evident, so many spammers started abusing it that spiders now have discounted the importance of this tag by at least half of its original ranking value. Most experts tend to think this tag has lower weight than the META description tag. But since the Yahoo! family of search engines still considers the keyword META tag when determining relevancy, it remains important in search engine optimization. Google, however, only considers the description META tag, so the keyword META tag holds no importance at all when optimizing for them . The best way to handle the META keywords is to use your main keyword phrase, a secondary keyword phrase, and a few synonyms of your keyword phrase in your keyword META tag. Make sure to focus the words in your keyword tag on that one page only, not on every single keyword that could possibly be associated with your entire Web site. Focus your tags on that page only. In some cases, if you don't use commas, you can increase the chance of matching a string of words or a phrase that someone might enter. However, if you use many of the same words in your different keyword phrases, it could look as if you're spamming the engine, so be careful. The idea is that if you are not using commas, you potentially cover more possibilities of search queries. Let's say our keyword phrases are "long-range weather forecast", "weather forecast software", and "software for desktop weather maps". By typing "long-range weather forecast software desktop weather maps" we cover all search queries by one entity.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed