|
FrontPage Web Design SEO
FrontPage Universe
Search Engine Optimization
Preparing your
pages
Make sure your site is
useful!
I'm always amazed by how many people miss this simple concept. They spend a
huge amount of time trying to get good search engine rankings and lots of
visitors, and then what do the visitors find? A poorly designed, badly written
website. If there's one bit of advice I wish I could drum into everyone who
visits this site, it is this:
"It isn't how many 'hits' you get, but how many 'sales' you make."
Making your pages "people-friendly" is as important as making them
"search-engine" friendly. It's usually much easier to double the effectiveness
of your website than it is to double your traffic, and the bottom line result is
the same. At the bottom of this article, I'll give you some advice on how to do
that.
But for now, let's talk about what you can do to help out the search engines.
Step 1 - Determine your Key Phrases
People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not
impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you
need to think about keyphrases.
The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me
type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out on the search
engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service.
If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should
reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Wilmington,
North Carolina, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time;
instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in wilmington north
carolina" is what you want to be thinking about.
Think about variations on the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with
our example:
- real estate in wilmington north carolina
- real estate brokers in wilmington north carolina
- buying real estate in wilmington north carolina
- selling real estate in wilmington north carolina
- renting real estate in wilmington north carolina
- home buying in wilmington north carolina
- house buying in wilmington north carolina
- selling a house in wilmington north carolina
- renting a house in wilmington north carolina
- renting an apartment in wilmington north carolina
- apartment renting in wilmington north carolina
- real estate brokers in wilmington nc
- buying real estate in wilmington nc
- selling real estate in wilmington nc
- renting real estate in wilmington nc
- home buying in wilmington nc
- house buying in wilmington nc
- selling a house in wilmington nc
- renting a house in wilmington nc
- renting an apartment in wilmington nc
- apartment renting in wilmington nc
- real estate brokers in new hanover county
- buying real estate in new hanover county
- selling real estate in new hanover county
- renting real estate in new hanover county
- home buying in new hanover county
- house buying in new hanover county
- selling a house in new hanover county
- renting a house in new hanover county
- renting an apartment in new hanover county
- apartment renting in new hanover county
The above is only a partial list, but you get the idea. You can also get a good
idea of what keyphrases and page design techniques work well by looking at other
pages that do well in the searches you've tried. Note that this sample list is
just a list of possible keyphrases -- we're not going to use
all of them because we won't have room.
One of our fellow users, Jeremy Holmes, pointed
out an interesting subtlety about keyphrase selection. Let's assume you find a
keyphrase that you think people will type in a lot. Try it, and look at the
results. If the results seem to be "on topic", then people are likely to drill
down several pages to find a listing that is just right for them. This kind of
keyphrase is one you want to target, but if you don't get on page one, you'll
still get traffic. If, on the other hand, the results are mostly irrelevant
(or full of spammed listings), then people will rarely look at page 2, or even
more than the first few listings. These keyphrases are thus not as valuable.
This doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't try to target it -- none of the
criteria are absolutes -- but it does mean that it will be more difficult to
get a useful listing with that keyphrase.
Two great resources for finding out what keyphrases are the most effective are
the
Overture.com Search Suggestions Page and
WordTracker.
On Overture's search suggestion page, you just type in a very general
keyphrase (like "real estate") and it tells you all of the more specific
keyphrases that relate to that keyphrase and how many hits they got.
Using our example of selling real estate in Wilmington, NC and entering "real
estate" into the Overture tool, I found that in October 1999, the broad
keyphrase "real estate" was searched for 67016 times (on Overture). However,
you'd never want to target that keyphrase, because you don't care if someone in
Kalamazoo wants real estate; you're only interested in people who want houses in
Wilmington. Looking down the list of results, I found that "north carolina real
estate" got 489 searches. That's a possibility. Doing a search suggestion on "wilmington"
revealed several hundred hits on "wilmington north carolina," "wilmington nc"
and related topics. Zooming in even further, getting a suggestion on "wilmington
real" found 36 hits on specific queries related to real estate in wilmington,
NC. These queries obviously don't get a huge amount of traffic, but because
they're so focused on what you're trying to do, they're often the best ones to
target.
WordTracker goes a bit further. It helps you develop lists of relevant
keyphrases, ranked by their popularity. It then queries the major search engines
to determine which keyphrases are the least competitive. It's usually not much
use targeting a popular keyphrase (lots of searches) if there are millions of
other pages that contain that keyphrase. On the other hand, a relevant keyphrase
that only gets a few searches a day but which has only a few pages competing for
it is a good candidate, because it will be much easier to get a high ranking.
WordTracker has a free trial that will give you a lot of information, and
additional services available by subscription - including some great tools for
working with Overture.
Disclaimer: WordTracker pays me a commission on any income generated from
clickthroughs from FrontPage Universe.com.
My advice is to use the Overture tool to get a rough idea what your
keyphrases should be (and find ones you might not have thought about), and then
use WordTracker to determine which ones you really should be targeting - and
(this is key!) to rank them in order of importance.
OK. At this point, you know what your best keyphrases are. You've got your list.
You've checked it twice. Now it's time to use it!
Step 2 - Crafting your <TITLE> tag
Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but
lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like "Bill Phillips - Real
Estate Broker" is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most
important keyphrases should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look
at your keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title
tag that uses them. Also, keep in mind that browsers only display the first few
words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So while
the first sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be
just a list of keyphrases.
There is some debate as to whether a very long title tag is a good thing or a
bad thing when it comes to search engines. Some people are concerned that a very
long title tag might result in the search engines deciding the page is a "spam
page." I'm waffling on this issue right now. Based on the available (scanty!)
evidence, my advice is to keep the title between 15 and 20 words. But you might
want to try longer title tags on some of your pages, just to see what happens!
So Bill Phillips might have a title that looks like this:
<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - New
Hanover County - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial
Property Office</TITLE>
The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keyphrases
and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You
want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyphrase
density and improves your rankings.
Step 3 - The Meta Tags
The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search
engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what
gets displayed.
Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the
<TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short
description of the web-page. If you think of your webpage as a news story, then
the title tag (the first part of it anyway, not any keywords you tacked on) is
the headline, and the meta description tag is the lead paragraph. In many search
engines, your search results will simply be your title tag followed by your meta
description tag, so make sure they work together to explain what's on the page.
The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:
<META name="description" content="whatever you want to place
here">
So, in our example, we might use:
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington,
North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments,
Commercial Property and Office Space">
My advice on the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200
characters. Remember: the description tag should be written for humans to read.
It should not be a list of keywords, and should be longer
(perhaps 50% longer) than your title tag.
The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases,
and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas.
Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word
more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better
keyphrases.
The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is
that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. Search engines aren't
as sensitive to keyword repeating as they used to be (most of them ignore extra
repeats), but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the",
"in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. Leave them in, but
don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of them.
If you've got a lot of keyphrases that really are relevant to your site, the
best thing to do is build "theme" pages devoted to a particular keyphrase or set
of keyphrases. This is good for you, good for your visitors, and appreciated by
the search engines. Use the most important keyphrases on your homepage.
Some people get confused about whether to use commas between phrases, and
whether to capitalize keywords. The truth is, some search engines pay attention
to the commas, some don't. But the ones who don't treat them as "white-space".
So just use commas as appropriate, but don't waste a character putting a space
after the comma. Similarly, just capitalize words as you might expect people to
normally use them. Most search engines will ignore the capitalization, but it
can't hurt to help out those that make note of it.
In addition, some search engines are sensitive to word order, others just to
presence of the keywords on the page. So for some search engines, "buying real
estate" is not the same as "real estate buying". This means it is a good idea to
word your phrases in the way you think most people are going to type them in.
If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The search
engines that don't pay attention to commas sometimes pay attention to sequences
of words. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them,
and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the
next keyphrase make up one of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases
for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too
much time over it.
Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200-400 characters. Unfortunately,
this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta
keywords tag even if you don't repeat a word too often. The theme pages concept
deals with this also. After pruning away, our sample keywords tag might look
like this:
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington
north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real
estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north
carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,new hanover
county,south-east north carolina,house broker,apartment broker,home
sales,apartment rental">
Step 4 - The first paragraph
The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything
in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it.
However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with
them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want
to make a good impression.
Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid
putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you
can. I don't have a banner ad on my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1>
or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks
tasteful!). Bill Phillips might use the following opening paragraph:
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real
estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the
last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home,
apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me
to be your guide.
Step 5 - Don't Go Overboard - and whatever you do, don't put up spam
pages!
You clearly want to have your important keyphrases on your page more than once,
because this is what gives the search engines a clue as to what your page is
really about. But you don't want your keyphrases to appear too many times,
because that might make the search engines think your page is a spam page trying
to rank highly for a particular phrase.
The question then becomes, how much is too much? And the answer is, nobody knows
for sure, and it's going to be different from search engine to search engine.
Rumor has it that Google likes pages with less than 13 repeats of a keyphrase,
for example.
My advice is to try and keep the number of repeats of important phrases down to
10 or less; this means all instances, in title, meta tags, and the text of the
page. Sometimes this simply isn't possible, because the phrase is so integral to
your topic, so don't get paranoid about this. Just keep it in mind.
There are certain classes of sites and pages that the big guys consider spam,
and either won't list, or will penalize. The major indexes consider the
following kinds of sites to be spam and will not list them:
- Affiliate sites with same or similar content but a different site designs.
- Mirror sites. Submitting mirror URLs to different categories is also
considered spam. Multi-lingual sites are acceptable as long as the URL
resolves to the appropriate language.
- Sites that use redirects or any type of bait-and-switch practice. Using
frames to hide a real URL, commonly referred to as "poor man's cloaking," is
also considered spam.
- Sites whose sole purpose is to drive traffic to affiliate links or sites
that contain these types of links.
- Sites without original content.
- Sites that are repeatedly resubmitted (over 5 times) without being
accepted.
In addition, the major search engines are actively penalizing/banning sites
that employ the following techniques:
- Web pages that are built primarily for the search engines and not your
target audience, especially machine-generated pages.
- Pages that contain hidden text and hidden links.
- "Great quantity and little value" pages.
- Link farming and link spamming, particularly free-for-all (FFA) links.
- Cloaking, a practice in which the search engine and the end user do not
view the same page.
- Sites with numerous, unnecessary host names (i.e. poker.abc.com,
blackjack.abc.com, etc.).
- Excessively cross-linking sites to artificially inflate a site's apparent
popularity.
- Affiliate spam.
People who repeatedly submit spam sites to the big guys have not only been
blacklisted, but in some cases, their previously submitted (and legitimate)
sites have been removed. So be nice to the Indexes, and they'll be nice to you.
And credit where credit is due: Chris Sherman's SearchDay Newsletter is the
place to find out what works -- and what doesn't -- with the search engines.
Do yourself a favor and check it out.
Putting it all together
Combining steps 1-5, we get some HTML that looks like this
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - New Hanover County - Buying
Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Office</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina -
Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments and Commercial Property">
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying
real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north
carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in
wilmington north carolina,new hanover county,south-east north carolina,house
broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"> </HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington,
North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the
last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home,
apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me
to be your guide.
... rest of your html
</BODY>
</HTML>
Extra Credit!
Now you've got a decent webpage, with good content and meta tags. You're ready
to submit to the search engines. Or are you?
What you've done so far are the basics. There's a lot more you can do, time and
money permitting, to improve your odds of ranking highly. Here are some tips on
what to do (and not to do), to get "extra credit" from the search engines.
Get your own domain name
This is the best investment you'll ever make. A domain name costs $10-30
a year, it's dirt cheap. There are three big reasons for getting your own domain
name:
- Some search engines won't list you unless you do.
- People are more likely to buy if you have your own domain name. What looks
better to you, "http://www.fredjones.com/" or "http://members.aol.com/fredjones123/"?
- You can change your webhosting service without messing up all of your
search engine listings. I get emails every week from people saying "I'm moving
from aol to msn, what will happen to my rankings?" If they had their own
domain name, nothing, it's not a problem.
This is an absolute no-brainer. Get your own domain name!
Don't get hyped about long domain names
I've been getting a lot of questions about the new, longer domain names that are
available. There is a lot of misinformation being passed around about them.
The big lie is that if you have a domain name with lots of
keywords in it (eg: add-url-register-website-promote-site-frontpageuniverse.com)
you will get a higher ranking in the search engines.
This is flat out not true. NONE of the major search engines
will significantly boost your rankings based on keywords in your url. Not one.
This is what they said when Danny Sullivan, editor of the highly recommended
Search Engine Watch Newsletter asked them, and I've confirmed it by
experiment. If the search engines look at them at all, they simply add the url
text to the rest of the page, so the added benefit of keywords in the URL is
totally insignificant. Don't waste your money.
My advice is to try and go for a short, memorable domain name, either 1 word or
2 words combined. Make it easy to type, and easy to
remember.
Avoid Search Engine Tricks
Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in
comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so
on. I strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't
work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search
engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them.
My philosophy is that you should try and help the search engines by making it as
easy as possible to get a good idea of what your page is about. That way, as
search engines get better and better at rating the contents of sites, your
rankings will get better over time, with no effort from you.
I know this is sort of repeating what I just said a couple of screens higher on
this page, but it bears repeating. If you try and fool the search engines, in
the long run, you'll be the fool.
Got Links?
Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's
a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to
just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing
this: First, many search engines are now using link popularity (how many other
pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other
sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed
that Inktomi applies a ranking penalty to any url submitted through their free
"Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by
following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and
penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the websites that
link to you.
Getting links isn't that hard. When you find a website that has content similar
to yours, email the webmaster and ask for a link, pointing out why it would be
appropriate. If he has content on his site useful to your visitors, link to him
without even offering to trade links. Link to him, then email him and ask for a
link back. A good site for learning the basics of getting links is
Linking 101.
The biggest search engine to use link popularity is Google (who came up with the
idea), and the two sites that generate the most link "value" on Google are Yahoo
and Open Directory. For many people, the true value of the $299 a year cost of a
Yahoo listing isn't the clicks from Yahoo, but the boost in their rankings on
Google. Open Directory doesn't cost anything, but getting in can be time
consuming.
A note about Framed sites
Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your website can hurt
their rankings. My experience is that this is not so, as long as you construct
your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your <frameset> page has
a proper title tag and meta tags. Similarly, your subframe pages should have the
same ingredients (perhaps with modified contents), as well as a little bit of
javascript that "pops" the user to the proper framed presentation if they surf
into the subframe page. Here's some sample javascript that works with just about
every browser:
<BODY onLoad="if (top == self) top.location.href = 'http://www.yourserver.com/yourframe.html';">
What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds that it is not in a
frame, it redirects the browser to the proper frameset url, whatever that might
be. A much more detailed explanation of how this can be done in various ways can
be found
in this excellent article.
Once you've got your pages configured, simply promote them all (the frameset
page and the subframe pages) to the search engines.
Hiding your JavaScript and CSS
If you are using Javascript or CSS in your pages, you probably stuck it at the
top of your pages. Whups! Remember that search engines tend to rate what they
find at the top of pages a bit higher -- and what do you have there? Pages of
Javascript!
A better way to do things is put the Javascript (or CSS) in a separate file, and
include it into your pages with a single tag. Here's an example of a <SCRIPT>
tag that includes a file full of Javascript.
<SCRIPT type="text/javascript" src="http://someplace.com/javascript/myscript.js">
It takes up much less space, and you can reuse the same code on all your pages
(and change it in just one place if you need to). Similarly, for CSS, you'd use
something like this:
<LINK REL=StyleSheet HREF="http://someplace.com/css/mystylesheet.css"
TYPE="text/css">
Both of these tags would go in your <HEAD> section, after your title and meta
tags.
Checking your HTML
Almost all websites have HTML errors, even those that appear to display nicely
on your browser. Browsers do a pretty good job of being tolerant of errors, but
even so, it's a good idea to make sure your HTML is as perfect as possible, as
this increases the chance that your website will display the way you want it to
on as many browsers as possible (both past, present and future).
I strongly recommend that you use a HTML Validator to check your pages, and my
favorite is the
W3.org HTML Validator.
While it is a little hard to use and unbelievably picky (good!), it's by far the
best I've found -- and given that it's written by the folks that define what
HTML is, it does the job right. One thing to be aware of with this tool is that
a single error can cause a cascade of error messages, so I typically fix the
first error reported, then revalidate.
What about a "robots.txt" file?
The robots.txt file is a special file you can place on your webserver to
restrict access by some or all webcrawling robots to some or all of your site.
You only need one if you want to place some areas of your website "off-limits"
to robots. If your whole website is open to them, you don't need one.
You can only have a robots.txt file if you own your own domain, because they are
always located in the same place (so the robot can find them!). .
If you feel you need a robots.txt file, then the complete specification how to
create one
can be found here.
One caution: some robots interpret a blank robots.txt file as
meaning "don't crawl any pages on this website." So if you don't need a
robots.txt file, don't have one (even a blank one!) on your server.
Making your site "people-friendly"
OK, you've got all your keywords set up. You've made life easy for the search
engines. Hopefully, you'll get a lot of traffic. Make sure you don't waste that
traffic by making sure your site effectively sells your products.
The art of creating websites that sell effectively does not
have to be for the "big guy's" only, fortunately, I've found an
online marketing course, one quite inexpensive, but many to
choose from, that do an excellent job of teaching you how to do it. I've
reviewed his courses in
detail, and it has helped me make major improvements
in this site.
You can
read more about them here.
Graduate School: Shopping Cart Traps
This tip is only relevant if you're running a shopping cart or tracking your
users individually as they move through your website. It's a very technical
issue, but it nails a lot of advanced website operators, so I thought I would
mention it. This problem does not apply to 99% of the people reading this page,
so if it sounds like it's written in martian, don't worry about it.
Here's the problem in a nutshell. A visitor arrives at your site,
www.coolstuff.com, and your super-duper advanced web-commerce server redirects
them to a url that encodes an individual user context, either a url with a ? in
it (eg: www.coolstuff.com/?CART=12345678) or a url with the users shopping cart
ID encoded into it (eg: www.coolstuff.com/12345678/). The classic example of
this kind of thing is Amazon.com; type "http://www.amazon.com" into your browser
and you'll end up at someplace like "http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/home/redirect.html/002-3104337-1035221"
These kind of urls give search engines apoplexy, and the most usual response is
to not index them at all.
Another common trick to maintain a user context is to use cookies, in particular
what I call the "Stupid ASP trick" of redirecting to the same webpage to set a
cookie (so named because it's a standard trick used by Microsoft's ASP
software). Search engines ignore cookies, so it doesn't work.
Individual user contexts cause huge problems for search engines, and they can
cause huge problems for you as well. A whacked-out web spider going through your
whole catalog adding all 327,123 of your products to a single shopping cart can
really make your day exciting.
The solution is simple: (1) don't create an individual user context until you
need to; don't create a shopping cart until the first item is ordered. (2) make
sure all actions that create or change an individual user context are hidden
behind POST forms -- because search engines don't follow such links.
In some cases, the software you are using doesn't allow you to do this. If so,
consider running two versions of your site, the public www.coolstuff.com, and
the "real" webcommerce version, "sales.coolstuff.com". The sites are identical,
except that all the "buy" buttons from www.coolstuff.com go to
sales.coolstuff.com, and there are no links back. So people who need a shopping
cart shift from the public site to the sales site, but the search engines stay
on the public side. Everyone's happy. PS: make sure that sales.coolstuff.com
only handles requests that come with a referer from www.coolstuff.com!
Whew, that's enough technical stuff for now! More will be
added soon.
More Search
Engine Optimization Articles here.....
|
