Expert Search Engine Optimization - Site design
Search Engine Page Design History
In the earlier days of search engine optimization, obtaining good search engine rankings was done mostly through the use of titles and meta tags. But as the search engines responded to misuse of these simple methods, now they are much more focused on page content and other less easily controlled factors. But page content is, after all, the only thing your viewers see, and thus it still is important, perhaps more so to viewers than to search engines.The days when webmasters could achieve high search engine rankings by inserting keywords in very tiny text, using text the same color as the background, and by repeating the same keywords over and over are long dead and gone. The search engines have responded to this trickery and may now penalize your site if they become aware that you are using very small or invisible text, if you cloak your pages or any of the other tricks de singed to fool them.
Note that I said if they become aware of it as I am of the opinion that this is something which is not detected algorithmically, but search engines often become aware through spam reports or periodically run searches to detect such spam.
They are also able to conclude that if a page of 1000 words contains the same word 200 times, it is likely to be spamming, and they act accordingly.
Page Design General Guidelines
You want to enrich your pages with keyword filled content. You want to put your most important information as high up on the page as you can. But you need to present your content in a balanced and ethical manner. Attempts to do otherwise can - and will - be held against you.
Remember too that your page content will be seen by your viewers and should be attractive, informative, and written to sell your product or service. You have to balance the content of your pages to serve two demanding masters; the search engines and your customers.
With that in mind, let's take a look at some techniques that you can ethically use to optimize your pages.
- Always opt for Header content as opposed to a larger font when the text contains a keyword. Header content is considered more descriptive of what is actually on the page.
- Place your most keyword rich content as high on the page as you can. As a general rule, the first 25 words of body text will be heavily weighted. Don't forget that the spiders crawl all the html in your page and thus may go through several hundred characters before it comes to your body text.
- When creating textual links, try to make the links a keyword. Keyword links will garner much more credit than 'Click Here.'
- Add keyword rich ALT text to your graphic links. Make certain, however, that the ALT text is descriptive of the link destination, and that you do not use the same word for your ALT text throughout the page. Repeating the same ALT text on every link is fairly easy for a spider to spot.
- Some search engines look for patterns and proximity in your text and rank pages where your keywords occur close to each other.
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