Search Engine Optimization

There are a number of things you can do to boost your site’s rating with search engines. Large companies can afford to pay for sponsored links and advertising with sites like Google or Yahoo, but most of us don’t have the necessary funds to splash out on that kind of luxury. Instead, we have to use other, more subtle techniques, to naturally inch our way up the ranks.

How a Search Engine Works
The best place to begin before optimizing your site is to try and understand a little of how a search engine spider works. At a very basic level, it will crawl through your page, and give it ‘points’ for certain things. Some it places more importance on than others, but put simply, the more of these things that you have, the more points you get and the higher your rating will be.

Before going into more detail on these areas, something you’ll need to take into consideration is frames. Web developers are generally split into two camps on this issue, and it’s reasonably safe to say that most people either love them or hate them. Frames undoubtedly do have their advantages, but if you’re trying to build a site that’s optimized for spiders, then they can only cause trouble.

If you make a site without frames, you allow the search engines to reference your page quickly and easily. But if you do decide to build inside a frameset, then you’ll have to make use of the noframes tag. However, for the sake of this tutorial lets assume that you’ve chosen not to use frames.

Onto the Important Stuff: Meta Tags and More
By now, just about everyone is aware of the meta tags that are available to developers, so it’s helpful to get these right from the beginning. Tedious as it may sound, always write individual meta code for each page of your site, as that way it has a greater chance of coming up through a search. By trying to condense the whole content of your site into a few keywords for one page, you’re ruining your chances.

You have several tags to choose from: meta name = ”keywords” and meta name = “description” being the most important two. Always put your most important words and phrases at the front. As a rule, you should also keep the tags short and sweet. A spider will attach more importance to five words than to fifty, so make those five words count. Pick out words that you think people will be searching for to get to your site.

Once you’ve picked your keywords and phrases for a page, you’ll want to ensure that they appear as often as possible within the text. Repetition of the words re-enforces their relevance to a search engine, so if your site is dedicated to anime, put “anime” in the copy as often as you can without it losing clarity.

There are plenty of ways to include your keywords multiple times on a page. Things like drop-down menus use them, as do breadcrumb trails. If your site design incorporates them, all to the good.

It’s also worth noting that a search engine will rate a keyword higher than normal if it is formatted in some way. As an example, lets see the anime page again. You’d like a title in the main text to say ‘Anime Characters’. Putting the phrase into an h1 tag will give it maximum importance to a spider. You can use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to define the format of that h1 tag so that it fits in with your overall design. So whilst it may not look like the traditional h1 tag on screen, the search engine only sees the all important heading tag, and rates it accordingly.

You can take this tactic even further, to make your keywords stand out. Place bold tags around your keywords as they crop up in the text and spiders will pick them out. You don’t necessarily want a user to see them in bold though, so override the look with your CSS. Again, the spider doesn’t see the end result, just the vital formatting.

Links are also something that spiders rate highly, in several ways. Continuing the formatting theme, spiders like to see links, and if a keyword is also a link, then that’s even better. Some things, like menus, will probably automatically use your keywords. But you can slip in some hidden links inside your copy if you’re clever. Put a keyword inside an alt tag, and link it either to a relevant page or itself. Now, use JavaScript to keep the cursor to a default on rollover. Instead of a hand indicating a link, the user will see a normal cursor. Should they happen to click on the text, the link will work for them.

You can add titles to links too, similar to an alt tag. They operate in a very similar way to the alt tag, displaying a hover caption when the link is rolled over. Duplicate your keywords in here to boost the number of times it appears in your page. This isn’t ideal though, as it does tend to interfere with the layout of the screen. If you don’t mind the caption though, it’s another possibility for you to use.

In addition to all of this, spiders will take note of all the outbound links on the page, and check out where they go. If the destination page is also packed full of similar keywords and phrases, then the link rates even higher. This is another reason why it’s worthwhile tailoring each page individually.

It’s not just outbound links either, search engines will also see how many external sites link to your own. Generally, the more the better, and again, if the link is from a source with similar keywords and a good rating, your own standing is increased.

Another thing to remember is that a search engine places higher importance on the start of the page’s code than on the end. So ideally, you want all your newly optimized text with keywords to come right under the body tag. But we all know that if you’re building a site, there’s generally a lot of code written before you ever get to the main content. So how can you get round this?

If you remove all your JavaScript (providing you have any of course) to an external .js file and link to it, that will save you a lot of space to bump up the important pieces of text.

You can also employ layers to shift the order of the code round a little without screwing up your design. By dividing the page up into layers, you can place layers with keywords right up the top and layers with less important design elements underneath, whilst still employing things like tables on the main page.

Of course this isn’t always ideal. Sometimes your design won’t allow you to work this way. But as with all of the points given above, you need to reach a compromise between the looks of the site and getting it rated with engines. Hopefully though, you should now have an even better idea of how to make your site top of Google.