Every smart Search Engine Optimiser starts his or her
career by looking at Web pages with the eye of a search
engine spider. Once the optimiser is able to do that, the
journey becomes a lot easier.
The first thing to remember is that the search engines rank
"pages", not "sites". What this means is that you will not
achieve a high ranking for your site by attempting to
optimise your main page for twenty different keyword
phrases. However, different pages of your site will appear
up the list for different key phrases if you optimise each
page for just one of them. If you can't use your keyword in
the domain name, no problem - use it in the URL of some
page within your site, e.g. in the file name of the page.
This page will rise in relevance for the given keyword. All
search engines show you URLs of specific PAGES when you
search - not just the root domain names like
www.marketing-scamfree.com but the paths like
www.marketing-scamfree.com/products.html
Second, understand that the search engines do not see the
graphics and JavaScript dynamics your page uses to
captivate visitors. You can use a graphic image of written
text that says you sell 20 red roses at $47. But it does
not tell the search engine that your website is related to
the sale of red roses' unless you use an ALT attribute
where you write about it.
Therefore you could easily have a wonderful graphic with a
picture of roses followed by the text "20 beautiful red
roses at only $47", but the search engine will only see the
following:
..img_src=".../images/sale_red_roses.png" width="250"
height="100" class="image"...
As you see there's nothing in the code which could tell the
search robots that the content relates to "Red Roses",
"Sale", or "Beautiful". The situation will change if we
rewrite the code like this:
...img_src="/images/sale_red_roses.png" width="250"
height="100" alt="Sale of Beautiful Red Roses"
class="image" ...
As you can see we've added the ALT attribute with the value
that corresponds to what the image tells your visitors.
Initially, the "alt" attribute was meant to provide
alternative text for an image that for some reason could
not be shown by the visitor's browser. Nowadays it has
acquired one more function - to bring the same message to
the search engines that the image itself brings to human
Web surfers.
The same concerns the usage of JavaScript. Look at these
two examples:
Visit our page about discounted floral arrangements!
script_language="JavaScript"
type="text/javascript"><!--document.write("Visit our page
about " + goods[Math.round(0.5 +(3.99999 *
Math.random()))-1]); -->
The first example is what visitors see, the second is the
source code script that produces the output. Assume the
search engine spider is intelligent enough to read the
script (however, actually not all the spiders do); is there
anything in the code that can tell it about the discounted
floral arrangements? Absolutely none!
As a rule, search engine spiders have a limit on loading
page content. For instance, the Googlebot will not read
more than 100 KB of your page, even though it is instructed
to look whether there are keywords at the end of your page.
So if you use keywords somewhere beyond this limit, this is
invisible to spiders. Therefore, you may want to acquire
the good habit of not overloading the HEAD section of your
page with scripts and styles. Better link them from outside
files, because otherwise they just push away your important
textual content.
There are many more examples of relevancy indicators a
spider considers when visiting your page, such as the
proximity of important words to the beginning of the page.
Here, as well, the spider does not necessarily see the same
things a human visitor would see. For instance, a left-hand
menu pane on your Web page. People visiting your site will
generally not first pay attention to this, focusing instead
on the main section. The spider, however, will read your
menu before passing to the main content - simply because it
is closer to the beginning of the code.
Remember: during the first visit, the spider does not yet
know which words your page relates to! Keep in mind this
simple truth. By reading your HTML code, the spider (which
is just a computer program) must be able guess the exact
words that make up the theme of your site.
Then, the spider will compress your page and create the
index associated with it. To keep things simple, you can
think of this index as an enumeration of all words found on
your page, with several important parameters associated
with each word: their proximity, frequency, etc.
Certainly, no one really knows what the real indices look
like, but the principals are as they have been outlined
here. The words that are high in the list according to the
main criteria will be considered your keywords by the
spider. In reality, the parameters are quite numerous and
include off-the-page factors as well, because the spider is
able to detect the words every other page out there uses
when linking to your page, and thus calculate your
relevance to those terms also.
When a Web surfer queries the search engine, it pulls out
all pages in its database that contain the user's query.
And here the ranking begins: each page has a number of
"on-the-page" indicators associated with it, as well as
certain page-independent indicators (like PageRank). A
combination of these indicators determines how well the
page ranks.
It's important to keep this in mind: after you have made
your page attractive for visitors, ask yourself whether you
have also made it readable for the search engine spiders.
In the lessons that follow, we will provide for you
detailed insight into the optimisation procedure; however,
try to keep in mind the basics you've learned here, no
matter how advanced you become.
----------------------------------------------------
Chris Wainwright is the owner of the website
http://www.marketing-scamfree.com , a website dedicated to
Online Marketing Tips and Techniques. Chris is a qualified
internet marketer with a professional background in Search
Engine Optimisation.
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