Things Your Website Must do for a Search Engine
It might seem obvious, but the most important visitors to a website are search engines and people and most websites usually require both.
But have you done any web site optimization for either of them ?
For a web site to be successful it needs to effectively cater to both search engines and people and that’s not easy, as both are often looking for entirely different things.
The task of designing or redesigning a web site for search engines is referred to as SEO or search engine optimization and designing a web site for people is usually just referred to as web site design. Modifying or redesigning a web site to cater to both is generally known as web site optimization.
The task of web site optimization usually includes webpage optimisation although it is possible to do web site optimisation without much or any web page optimization.
The main factors that interest a search engine are:-
Keyword usage & placement
Use no more than two main keyword phrases on a web page placed so as to emphasize the relative importance of those phrases to the search engine. It is very difficult to effectively optimize a web page for more than two key phrases. Headlines and sub-headlines that make use of h tags and bold type are still important.
Page title and description
These should be unique and contain at least one main keyword phrase. Search engines generally use these for a listing in the search results. Google uses only the first 155 characters in the description and the first 65 characters in the title. Pages with duplicate titles on the same web site are often not indexed, especially with Google. This can be a problem for shopping catalogue sites whose pages may be generated with the same titles.
Meta tags & compatibility
The only meta tag of real importance to the search engines, in particular Google, is the title tag which to be compatible with Google should be less than 65 characters. Although Google does read and analyze titles containing more than 1,100 characters, it does not display them. Google and MSN have NO specific interest in keyword meta tags, so filling them full of keywords serves no purpose. Yahoo for the time being does still take account of keyword meta tags.
Site & page coding
Search engines live to consume text and that’s their main interest. They can NOT read text in images and only Google has a limited capability to read text content in Flash movies. The page coding should be kept to a minimum and placed if possible below the main body text content. This makes the page coding more search engine friendly. Page compression that involves removing white space in the page code will also speed up access time for the search engine.
Internal linking structure & tags
The manner in which pages are linked and what pages are linked together is very important to a search engine. This generally tells a search engine how important different pages are on the site. Of prime importance is using plain text links instead of image links. This provides additional information to a search engine to enable it to determine what the topic of the page being linked to is about. Image alt tags and link title tags should also be used to convey more of the information you want to convey to the search engine.
External linking
The quality and quantity of incoming links has increased in importance, particularly with Google. Google places a high value on quality links from well established sites, particularly if those sites have human editors. Generally quality is also more important than quantity. The link text is also of high importance in ranking the page.
Page & site theme
The pages on a site have a theme determined by the page content and the links to the page. The themes of individual pages and the way they are linked together will determine the theme of the site as a whole. A consistent theme throughout a site enables a search engine to gain a clearer picture of what the site is about leading to better and more consistent rankings.
Age of domain
How long a site has existed and is currently registered for is important to Google, particularly for highly competitive search terms. Sites registered for only 1 year are generally not taken as seriously for rankings, being regarded by search engines as not likely to be around for long. Domain age is however less important to MSN or Yahoo.
Important things to avoid
The major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN Live DO NOT like cloaking, mini-nets of sites from the same owner excessively linked together, keyword stuffing, duplicate site content, text hidden on a web page or links from link farms.
Google especially does not like paid for links and encourages people to report sites that use them. It is therefore important to avoid all of these, or be prepared to suffer the consequences.
Search engines have penalties for infringements of their guidelines which can range from warnings, lowering of rankings, page de-indexing or in severe cases removing the entire site from the search index.
Of course there are more factors of interest to the major search engines than the ones discussed here. But, these represent the key influencers that have been established through my own years of experience and that of others in the worldwide SEO community.
In the continuing article to this one are the factors that are of most influence to people visiting a web site. These influencers include visual appearance, visitor impact, clarity and value of offer, speed and ease, page and site navigation, the offer experience and page access time. We also outline the most common failings of the offer fulfilment process.
For ‘people’ visitors to a web site the key factors of importance have a lot more to do with human psychology and perception. Hence website optimization for ‘people’ imposes a very different set of requirements on the design or redesign of a web site than those needed for a search engine.
For a Free evaluation of what search engines make of your web site
visit our web site optimization evaluation page.
We have many years of experience in webpage optimization and search engine optimization. We offer an extensive range of web site optimization services to site owners seeking to improve search engine rankings, or increases sales and profitability using existing levels of visitor traffic.
Visit our web site optimization services page for more details and Free evaluations of our services.
Tony Simpson
Making web site optimization work for you