Designing for Search Engines
When you design a website, it's easy to focus on what your
visitors are going to see. What you have to realise, though, is
that you're going to have another kind of visitor with a
completely different agenda: they're not going to be looking at
your pretty logo and they're not going to be passing judgement
on your background colour. What they're looking for is the
content and structure of your page.
They're the search engine spiders, and they are in control of
probably the largest section of your traffic. You need to please
these spiders if you want your site to be successful. Here's how.
Make Your Structure Clear
Resist the temptation to lay your page out in non-standard ways:
you want it to be very clear to the search engine where the
navigation is, where the content is, and where the headings are.
As a rule, put navigation first in your page. Always use the
heading tags (h1, h2, etc.) for headings and sub-headings.
Avoid using generic span and div tags and only making things
clear to the user through CSS font sizes: instead, use every
'semantic' HTML tag that applies to your content. If you're
quoting someone, use the blockquote tag; if you're posting
program code, use the code tag. Search engines love this.
Keep Keywords Consistent
It's not usually worth deliberately saturating your content with
keywords in hope of a higher search ranking - the engines have
pretty much wised up to this tactic - but do make sure that your
keywords appear consistently when they occur naturally. For
example, for these articles, I have stuck with 'website'
throughout, as suddenly writing 'web site' instead would bring
down my rankings.
HTML and Javascript
It's worth noting that search engines read HTML, but they don't,
in general, read Javascript. That means that using Javascript to
insert text into your page is a bad idea if you want search
engines to see the text. On the other hand, you might want to
have just the text in HTML and insert all the other parts of the
page with Javascript: this will tend to make your page appear
more focused, although you should be careful not to insert
navigation links this way if you want the search engines to
follow
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them.
Use Meta Tags
Yes, meta tags are out of fashion, and search engines pay no
attention to them any more when it comes to ranking your site,
but they're still important in one way: the meta description tag
is still often used to decide what text search engines' users
see when they find your site in their results! This can be just
as important as the ranking itself - write something here that
will look useful to the searcher, and you're more likely to get
them to click-through. Don't forget that, while search engines
are just machines and algorithms, the end result of it all does
involve a human decision: to click, or not to click?
Avoid Splash Pages
You might think it's a great idea to have a 'splash' page
displaying a full-page version of your logo (or an ad) to every
user who arrives at your site, but search engines really hate
that. Using this trick will get you ranked far lower than you
would usually be, so you should avoid it - it's annoying to
visitors anyway.
Include Alt Tags
Any time you use a graphic, include alt text for it - especially
if there is text in the graphic. Remember that, as far as search
engines are concerned, all your graphics might as well just be
big black boxes. Test by removing all your graphics and seeing
if your content remains relatively intact. If it doesn't, then
you'll be turning search engines away.
Finally, Write Great Content
The key with modern search engines (and, at the same time, the
thing you have least control over) is how many people decide to
link to your page from their page. How can you make more people
link to you? Make your content useful. Make it something they'll
want to quote on their blogs. Content is more King than it's
ever been, and the best way to design for search engines is to
make your content really s
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