Optimizing the page content
Position your target keywords to appear in the important locations. The heading tags are important. Include the keywords in the heading tag. Try to write them in such a way that the keywords are placed closer to the beginning of the tag.
Some say that text with a larger font size or that are made will carry more weight than text in the normal font size of the page. Similarly, text with a smaller font size than the regular font will get lesser weight from the search engine spiders.
It is believed that the first words of an html tag are of more importance to the search engine than the words that come later. Some spiders may not index the whole page, so it’s useful to have the code of your important body content as close to the top of the page as possible.
The first two paragraphs are extremely important when search engine spiders look at the content of your web page. It is believed that the search engines prefer pages where keywords appear near the top of the page. Include them in the first two paras of your web page. However the entire content is important.
The bottom line is to ensure a proper keyword density while keeping the copy as attractive as possible to the human visitors.
However, placement of the body content near the top becomes a factor if you have a lot of javascript in the head section, or if you are using a table structure. The codes of the table or javascript pushes the real textual content downwards.
If you want to optimize javascript, put all the javascript code in an external .js file and call that file from within your html file.
Click here to learn more about search engine optimization of javascript.
Some people in the SEO industry believe that search engine spiders are not able to read the text in the tables. Tables can push your textual content further down, making keywords less relevant because they appear lower. This is because tables will break apart when search engine spiders read them. For example, visualize a two-column table, where the first column has links, while the second column has the main text. Figure 1. – Humans will see the page this way.
| Apple Banana Pineapple |
Fruits are extremely nutritious and contains many essential vitamins. Let fruits constitute the major part of your diet. |
Apple
Banana
Pineapple
Fruits are extremely nutritious and contains many essential vitamins. Let fruits constitute the major part of your diet.
See how the keyword-rich main content has moved downwards. But I have never found tables to be an obstacle for high search engine rankings, provided if you have great content, optimized meta tags and a good link popularity score. However, there are a few things to remember while using tables.
Remember the spider reads the table left to right and top to bottom. So the text in the first column of the first row will carry more importance than any other cell. Try to keep your navigational links or the most important content in the first cell/column of a table. Use textual navigation links in your first column instead of graphical buttons.
Another suggestion is to place some great headlines by using the header tags at the very top of your page , outside the table. These will first be read by the engines.
Keep the structure of the table as simple as possible. Nested tables sometimes create problems. A nested table is a table inside another table. There’s one main rule when it comes to nesting – do not go too deep.
If you want to use every known method, you may try Jere Matlock’s Table Trick. It is a tool that helps you place your main table section of code first. I have not tried it personally, but some people claim that it is good. It is not considered spam technique.
Another important location where you should place your keywords are the text withinthe anchor tag and the alt tag of the images. Search engines read and lay emphasis on the text within the links, so use them to impress the search engine spiders. Try to use textual links wherever possible, since spiders cannot read images. Place your keywords in the alt tag of your text. Do not just write a series of keyword, but make proper grammatical sentences.
Some believe that spiders assign more importance to the last few sentences of a web page, since they are probably looking for conclusion information. Include your important keywords atleast once in the last three sentences.
Making navigation easy for the crawler
Try to read the web pages from the standpoint of a search engine spider. It cannot read images, frames, javascripts or nested tables. All it does is crawl the world wide web and collect information about web sites. When it comes across a new web page, it puts it in the index. It then follows the links within that web page to find other pages within that site.
If you want to get a high rank high in the search engine listings, all you have to do is make the job of the spider easier.
Sometimes, web masters, in order to give their web site a pleasant appearance, place text in the form of graphics. Often you will come across a site on the Internet that has got nothing but a big image on it’s homepage. The visitors can go to the other pages of the web site. This might not have created any difficulty for the human visitors.
But a search engine cannot read images and therefore cannot enter the site. Often web masters use only image map links in their web pages. A search engine spider that can’t follow these links will not be able to read the other pages of the site. I highly recommend that you avoid image map links and use text links whenever possible.
If you still want to use image map links, solve the odds against it by adding text links at the bottom of the page. The spider will be encouraged to find other pages on your web site using these text links.
Add a sitemap page to your site and name it site-map.html. It will link to every page of your web site textually and submit this page to the search engines. It will help the search engines locate pages within your web site.
Be sure to internally link the pages of your site with each other in order to help the spider find your complete site. Make all your pages link to your homepage.
Link popularity building
The search engines incorporated popularity factors into their ranking algorithm in order to create better relevancy formulae. This does not mean that the on-the-page factors or the importance of the main content can be ignored. If there are two sites with equally optimized meta tags and attractive content, the site having more link popularity will win the search engine optimization game.
Therefore, if you want to succeed in the search engine ranking battle, on-the-page optimization will no longer help unless it is enhanced with high-end link popularity.
The link popularity of a web site is the total number of web sites linking to it. Link analysis is closely related to link popularity, but with a twist. Link analysis is the number and quality of the inbound links point to your site. Here, it is not the number of links that matters, but the quality of those links that is important.
In a link analysis system, it is easy to filter out the spammers who set up several free sites and then make them link to their main web site. Nowadays, search engines do not give importance to links from free web sites in their link popularity scores. They combine link popularity with link analysis and use it to assign a weighted link popularity score. Presently, many major search engines make use of link analysis in their ranking algorithm.
So, in order to rank well in the search engines, start building links to your site. How do you do that? This is the most difficult and time-consuming aspect of search engine optimization. I have a special article that covers every aspect of link analysis and also methodologies to increase your score in link analysis system.
However, the oldest and best way of increasing link popularity is to ask for a link. In this process, you directly contact the owner of a site via email or other means, asking for a link to your site. In your email you may briefly explain why you think the link will benefit their visitors. You would generally offer to link back to them in exchange for this courtesy.
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