Site Optimization: More Key Points to Remember - Spider Friendly, Visitor Friendly
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Search engines examine the terms and phrases in a web page, and from that they can extract a great deal of information about the page – and, from a group of pages, about a site as a whole. Sure, they learn something from the frequency of certain terms, but that’s not the only thing they weigh. Writing well for search engines is part art, part science; there are books on the subject. Since search engines jealously guard their algorithms, SEOs can only make very educated guesses. In general, though, writing well for the search engines is very similar to writing well for your site visitors.
If you want to optimize your on-page text to score well in the search engine rankings, here are some rules to keep in mind:
- Make sure the main keyword/phrase for which you wish to rank well is featured prominently on your page. Don’t worry too much about measuring your keyword density; its importance is arguable at best. But the general frequency of the term can help your rankings.
- Keep all of the text on your page on-topic and of high quality. Yes, search engines really do look for high quality writing; they are capable of performing some pretty sophisticated analysis of the words on your web pages. It’s not just the artificial intelligences you have to please, but the real ones as well; the large search engines have teams of researchers who work on identifying and describing the common elements in high quality writing. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, of course – but keep in mind that good writing is one of those things that both the search engines and your visitors will appreciate.
- Structure your document so that it flows from broad to narrow topics. You’ll want to start with a description of the content, of course, so that both the spiders and your human visitors know what to expect. It makes the entire page more readable. There are situations in which this would not be an appropriate way to structure the page; in such cases, of course, you can disregard this advice.
- Try to keep the text of your document together. Many SEO experts say that it is better to use cascading style sheets rather than table layouts for this reason. CSS allows you to keep the text flow of the document together and prevent the text from being broken up by coding. You can achieve this with tables, too; just make sure that text sections (i.e. content, ads, navigation, and so forth) flow together inside one table or row. You should also avoid having too many “nested” tables that make for broken sentences and paragraphs.
There was a time when text layout and keyword usage in a document were very important, but that is no longer true. Do they still make a difference? Yes, to some degree; but there is no reason to obsess over keyword placement or text layout any longer.
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