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In This Issue:
What Search Engines Like
Search engines work with text. They read the content
on your pages and in your title and meta tags, recording this
information in their database. Without text, the search engine has
nothing to work with. The search engines must be able to follow links
from your home page to the other pages on your site that contain good
content.
These are some of the search
engine friendly items we consider while
designing a Web site.
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Give
the engines plenty of keyword-rich text to work with.
Text near the top of the page is more important.
Use your keywords in the text as much as
possible, integrated into content that reads well. It's important to
place keywords at the beginning of paragraphs and headings.
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Make
sure the search engines have plenty of basic links to follow.
The search engines will index the text on your home page and then
attempt to follow the links on your home page to other pages in your
site. This process is called "spidering" or "crawling."
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Provide
hypertext links. Ideally, links should
have a keyword in the link text
.
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Provide
meta tags. We always
provide a title, meta keywords, a meta description, and a
descriptive comment tag on all indexable
pages. We try to make the titles, keyword,
and so forth unique if possible and apply to the particular page.
How Search Engines Use Link Analysis
Link analysis is used by several engines as part of
their ranking algorithm, most notably Google.
The reason search engines place greater emphasis on
link analysis is because it is difficult to "fake" good links to your
site. The belief is that link analysis gives search engines a useful
and unadulterated method to determine which pages are good for
particular topics.
Thus in theory by building links to your site you
can improve how well your pages rank by engines that analyze links.
Link
analysis is not the same thing as link popularity. Getting lots of
links is meaningless. It's much more important to get links from good
web pages that are related to the topics you want to be found for.
It's not quantity of links, it quality of links pointing to your site.
Today, the search engines look beyond sheer numbers.
Since all links are not created equal, the engines attempt to rank the
importance of each link, and to understand the context of the link.
The authority and quality of a page also factor into
link analysis. It's important to have links
on topical directories or web guides related to your sites subject
matter. Having a few links from important pages will always be more
important than having a thousand links on useless sites.
Link context is another aspect of link analysis.
Link context analyzes how close a link appears on a page to keywords
within the text of that page. If all this sounds confusing, you're not
alone. It's PhDs who create these algorithms, so us regular folks have
our work cut out for us.
Here
is what we can do to take advantage of it.
1). Seek links from good pages that are related to
the terms you want to be found for.
2). Remember that while search engines make use of
link analysis, they do not rely on it 100%. They still look at your
site, too. So, make sure your site includes the terms you want to be
found for.
3). Identify good sites to link to yours by using
search engines and your key search terms. Review the pages at the top
of the results. See if any of the sites in the results will link to
your site.
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