seo
posted in search engine optimization  on 3 April 2007
by Andrew Lang 
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Help search engines identify your page

A follow-on from the previous post about Google Adsense, here's a summary of how to help search engines categorise and identify the nature of your page's content (remember, spiders want to identify individual pages and find out what they're about).

Here's a quick dialogue between your page and the search engine spider:-

Spider: "Hello page. I'm trying to work out what you're about. I hope I can easily find this out because it will help us accurately index your page, and it'll also help with your rankings since we're confident that we know what you're page is about. Can you help me?"

Page: "....." (this is up to you).

To give your page some eloquence here, use the following:
  • a friendly URL. For example http://www.yourwebsite.com/shoes/trainers/nike-air-jordans.html
  • Descriptive, functional page TITLE. Just describe the necessary subject in as few words as possible. For example: "Shoes | Trainers | Nike Air Jordans" (the pipe divider seems to be the standard way of dividing up words)
  • H1 tags. This should be uniform with the page title, so something like "Shoes > Trainers > Nike Air Jordans"
  • ALT text for images that identify the image exactly. If you have a picture of Nike Air Jordans, say so in the alt text. Also, your image (and therefore your website) is more likely to appear in image searches too (e.g. Google Image Search).
  • Feature keywords that are relevant to the page in the META keywords. This leaves more identifying clues for the spider. Don't spam words - treat META keywords as an identification tool.
  • Use original, unique words for your content body, featuring relevant related words to the subject of the page. For example, for Nike Air Jordans, use words like "trainers" ("pumps"), "streetwear", "sportswear", "shoes" etc. This builds up a good profile for your page and helps draw a target around the subject of the page.
  • DON'T dilute the page with unrelated content. This confuses search engine spiders as to the nature of your web page
  • Internally link the page using useful anchor text - e.g. "Nike Air Jordan Trainers" as anchor text
  • Build up external links to your website (likely: homepage of your website) all using a good variation of anchor text that relates to the various themes of your website
  • Overall, keep the words uniform on the URL, page TITLE, H1 tag and content body

Search engines like well organized ("semantic") pages where the nature of the content is easy to identify. They reward such pages with higher rankings because it makes their job easier to produce accurate search results. How is that? Since they have confidently identified the nature of the content of these pages, they know they can match up these pages to particular keyword searches with the assurance that these will be relevant results.

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