SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)
and web-positioning techniques.
The Basic Principles.
How
to optimise web pages.
by Ammon Johns
Optimising pages is about making the most of features that
search engines reward, and minimising all the things that
they penalise.
Ensure that your most important keywords and subjects are
as prominent (close to the top of the document in the source
code) as is possible to achieve within your document layout.
The Title is one important area, and having the most relevant
keywords in the document title is of great benefit. Remember
however that many engines will only display the first 70 characters
of your title, so don't try to cram too much in to a single
title. A neat, snappy, 'headline' style title is generally
best.
The META tags (description and keywords) are no longer the
major factor in ranking that they once were. FAST,
Lycos,
Google and other similar
engines will actually ignore these tags. In other engines,
you should keep the description to 150 characters for it to
display correctly several engines will cut off anything after
the first 150 characters when displaying the listings.
The actual body of your document is the most vital of all,
especially the first 150-250 characters of visible text
on the page. However, many search engines will look for
keywords spread throughout the page, and so the last paragraph
can also be important.
In general, the best way to optimise a page is by working
on the source code, much as the spider will see the page.
In this way you can instantly see the effect that can be made
in table layouts, or by javascript blocks pushing your real
content further down the page.
With many search engine algorithms, using main keywords in
filenames and other parts of the URL will help to attain a
higher ranking. Don't overdo it though, because shorter URLs
are generally preferred over longer ones.
How
do search engines index pages?
How
do I optimise my web pages?
Index