Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
There's no magic formula that you can use to optimize your Web pages for search
engines such as Google. It's mostly a matter of common sense: genuinely useful content
that is presented without trickery gathers an audience. Eventually, an audience
translates into higher search rankings.
Here's some more information (from Chapter 2).
You can find more information about Google’s take on SEO on the Google Information for Webmasters site (look for the Guidelines, Fact & Fiction, and SEOs topic links towards the bottom of the page).
You should know that some SEO techniques, such as the ones I explain in this section, do help with search result ranking in Google. However, it’s clear that trying to get too cute often backfires. For example:
- Bad meta tags: In particular, adding irrelevant meta tags to pages (meta tags are descriptive HTML tags intended to be read by software such as the Google Web crawler and not by the humans visiting a Web page) isn’t a very good idea. Google lowers the PageRanks of pages that do this.
For example, the common practice of including a popular movie star’s name as a meta tag in a page having nothing to do with the star will likely lower (not raise) a page’s ranking.
- Link farms: Trading links with other sites solely for the purpose of improving your rank will usually do more harm than good. If the sites are identified as link farms (sites that consist only of links and/or exist for the purpose of trading links) Google will “mark-down” your ranking.
Here are some “real” SEO techniques that improves the ranking of Web pages within Google’s search results (and help researchers find the information they need):
- Good content that is of genuine interest goes a long way.
- Simple site designs are better than busy pages. Google cannot “read” images, and is not particularly fond of Flash, Java, or JavaScript, either. Text-based pages with plain formats and simple HTML are most successful.
- Pages with content that is often renewed tend to get the more attention than pages that don’t have anything new.
- Determine the most important keywords that are relevant to your content. You can make this determination by searching in Google with a variety of keywords and analyzing results, creating a program using the Google APIs that tracks keyword as I explain in Chapter 18, or by registering for the Google AdWords program and seeing how expensive different keywords are to advertisers. With keyword importance information in hand, add the most important keywords (but not too densely) to titles, headings, URLs, and image tags on each page.
- Cross-link within your Web pages
- Create links from your pages out to relevant, popular Web pages (these links are called outbound links)
- Request that sites that have content related to your pages link to you (these links are called inbound links)
A good resource for learning about optimizing your site for Google is the Google FAQ at Webmaster World.
It’s really helpful to get an idea of how your Web pages and sites are viewed by a Web crawler such as the Google bot. The best way to do this is to open your Web page in a text-only browser. One text-only browser is Lynx. If you don’t want to get into the hassle of downloading the source code for Lynx for the Windows platform and compiling it, the easiest way to see use Lynx to see what a Web page looks like when it is reduced to its text is use Lynx Viewer.
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Search Engine Optimization
 
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