Play Nice with Search Engines!

Just about everyone wants their site to do well in search engines. All to often simple mistakes in creating a site lead instead to search engine oblivion. Are you unwittingly saying "Boo!" to the robots when they visit?

Optimising for search engines is not something you should do after your site is complete, it should be the first thing on your mind on day one of the project. This article is not about advanced optimization nor is it about actually submitting to search engines, it is about the basic principles of creating pages and sites that make it easy for search engines to do their job. You make it easier for them and they will make it easier for you! Later you can tweak and smooth and optimize to perfect your site and maximise your results, following these principles from the start will make that job much easier.

First 10 Do's

1. Research your Keywords

Day one of your design project go to the Search Term Selection Tool at Overture and find out what people search for when they are looking for a site like yours. Make a list of the most important two or three word phrases, write them in large letters and pin them up somewhere so that you can see them easily as you build the site.

2. Put text on your pages

Robots are mindless machines. They cannot read text in graphics, so if your home page consists of an image and an enter link there is not much they can do. A short paragraph, rich in keywords and phrases, will allow you to get the attention of the bots without spoiling the brilliance of your design.

3. Count Every Page

Remember that each page in your site is a potential entry point. For each page pick one or two of the most relevant phrases from your list and incorporate them in the text.

4. Use Your 50 Magic Words

The first 50 words of the content on any page are the most important, then the next 50, then the next 50. After that the importance from a search engines point of view is way less. So write the precious first 50 words with care, incorporating your chosen key phrases for that page.

5. Put Alt Text on All Images

Alt text on images and title text on links is read by robots, it is important so do not leave it out. While it is better if page content appears first, depending on the page layout this alt text may be the first text the robot sees. Use it carefully to add key phrases but do not abuse it by adding long strings of keywords. Make it sensible and useful to human users as well as to the machines, it is important especially to those using non graphic browsers.

6. Write Effective Page Titles

They matter a lot to search engines and are also what will appear underlines in the search results, so they matter to potential users too. Get your most important key phrases into them, so "Welcome to Joe's Widget Website" is bad, "Squiggly and Solid Widgets, Best Prices at Joe's" is better.

7 . Box Clever

Sometime the important search phrases you find make no grammatical sense. An real example: the most important search phrase for a site was "travel Ireland". Not easy to put in a sentence. So there are several places where one sentence ends with "...travel." and the next starts with "Ireland...". Not perfect but it gets them in.

8. Use Your Head!

Or at least your heading tags! Text between <h1> and </h1> is given more importance than standard text, so write your headings as carefully as your title tag.

9. Think About Links

No, not getting them, that comes later. Text that is linked is given more importance by some search engines. So, although the words 'click here' have been shown in some studies to result in more users clicking a link, they will not do much for search engines. Link important key phrases instead.

10. Use meaningful Directory and File Names

A URL that ends in /wiginfo/sqwdgts.html will not do as well as one that ends in /widget_information/squiggly_widgets.html. The difference may be marginal but it matters. It will make life easier for you too.

Now, things to avoid, some Don'ts.

1. Don't Obsess Over Meta Tags

Sure, use your keyword and description meta tags, but they are less important than they were, matter little if at all to most robots and are not worth spending a lot of time on.

2. Don't Overdose on Key Words

Cramming in your keywords or phrases excessively will not only make your page unreadable, it will alert the robots to potential spamming. Be careful of this if using alt text to place key phrases on the page - I once saw a page with an image rendered as 12 slices, each little piece with the same key phrase in the alt text. That's spam.

3. Don't Use Hidden Text

Using text the same color as the background, really tiny text or any other means of hiding text will get you banned or reduce your ranking.

"I never would!"

Are you sure? It is an easy mistake to make. If your page uses a cell with a dark colored background containing white text, unless your page background is set to a color other than white the search engines will see a problem.

4. Don't Use Frames without No Frames

If your page is framed, be sure to add content between the <noframes></noframes> tags. Unless it contains your key phrases the sentence "This site uses frames, but your browser doesn't support them" is not enough - the content should be useful to both search engines and to users, albeit that there are few of them, using non-frames compatible browsers.

5. Don't Try to Trick the Search Engines

Everywhere you go you will find articles about various 'tricks' to improve your search engine ranking. Be careful, many of them simply do not work, others will get you banned. Research each before even considering using it, look for the opposing view, read the search engines own guidelines on the subject or just post a message in the forums asking people's opinion.

And finally ......

6. Don't Lose Sight of the Purpose

Remember that your site does not exist for Search Engines, it is easy in the effort to improve position to overlook the fact that what really matters is good content, good customer service and happy users. If spending time on optimization is taking you away from improving these things, it may be time to either refocus your efforts or to outsource your optimization work.

Some Interesting Links

Death of the Meta Tag