SEO-Meta Tags
The Meta Tag Myth
Some Years ago Meta Tags were the primary tool for search engine optimization and there was a direct correlation between what you wrote there and your position in search results. However, the algorithms got better and today the importance of metadata becomes less day by day, especially on the Google. Still some search engines show metadata. So users can read what you have written and if they think it is relevant, then they will might go to your site. Also, some of the specialized search engines still use the metatags when listing and ranking your pages.
The Meta Description
This tag is just one more way for you to write a description of your site, thos directing the search engines to what themes and topics your Web site has and is relevant for. It does not hurt to include at least a small description, so don’t skip it. For instance, for the music site, the meta Description tag could be something like this: <Meta Name=”Description” Content=”All the Music you search for, you will find here. All Music from Classic to Heavy Metal.”
The Meta Keywords
A potential use of the meta Keywords tags is to include a list of keywords that you think are relevant to your pages. The major search engines will not take this into account but still it is a chance for you to emphasize your target keywords. You may consider including alternative spellings (or even common misspellings of your keywords) in the meta Keywords tag. For instance, if I were to write the meta keywords tag for the dog adoption site, I would do it like that: <Meta name=”Keywords” Content=”Music, Search, Classic, Heavy Metal, Jazz, Billy Holiday, xxx”>. It is a small boost to search engine top ranking but why miss this chance?
The Meta Robots
The meta Robots tag deserves more attention. In this tag you specify the pages that you do NOT want crawled and indexed. It happens that on your site you have contents that you need to keep there but you don’t want it indexed. Listing this pages in the meta Robots tag is one way to exclude them from being indexed.
Content is the King if you like it or NOT
If you are new to SEO, it might be a surprise for you that text is one of the driving forces to higher rankings. But it is a fact. Search engines and also readers love fresh content and providing them with regularly updated, relevant content is a recipe for success. Generally, when a site is frequently updated, this increases the probability that the spider will revisit the site sooner. You can’t take for sure that if you update your site daily, the spider will visit it even once a week but if you do not update your contents regularly, this will certainly drop you to from the top of search results.
For company sites that are not focused on writing but on manufacturing adding text can be a problem because generally company sites are not reading rooms or online magazines that update content daily, but even for company sites there are reasonable solutions. No matter what your business is, one is for sure – it is always relevant to include a news section on your site – it can be company news or RSS feeds but this will keep the big thing rolling.
Top Themes or How to Frequently Add Content to Your Site
If you are doing the SEO for an online magazine, you can consider yourself lucky – fresh content is coming all the time and you just need to occasionally arrange a heading or two or a couple of paragraphs to make the site SEO-friendly. But even if you are doing a SEO for an ordinary company site, it is not all that bad – there are ways to constantly get fresh content that fits into the topic of the site.
One of the intricacies of optimizing a company site is that it has to be serious. Also, if your content smells like advertising and has no practical value for your visitors, this content is not that valuable. For instance, if you are a trade company, you can have promotional texts about your products. But have in mind that these texts must be informational, not just sales hype. And if you have a lot of products to sell, or frequently get new products, or make periodical promotions of particular products and product groups – you can post all this to your site and you will have fresh, topical content.
Also, depending on what your business is about, you can include different kinds of self-updating information like lists of hot new products, featured products, discounted items, even online calculators or order trackers. Unlike promotional pages, this might neither bring you many new visitors, nor improve your ratings but is more than nothing.
One more potential traffic trigger for company sites are news sections. Here you can include news about past and coming events, post reports about various activities, announce new undertakings, etc. Some companies even go further – their CEO keeps a blog, where he or she writes in a more informal style about what is going in the company, in the industry as a whole, or in the world in general. These blogs do attract readers, especially if the information is true, rather than the official story.
An alternative way to get fresh free content are RSS feeds. RSS feeds are gaining more and more popularity and with a little bit of searching, you can get free syndicated content for almost any topic you can think of.
Try Bold and Italic Text
When you have lots of text, the next question is how to make the important items stand out from the crowd – for both humans and search engines. While search engines (and their spiders – the programs that crawl the Web and index pages) cannot read text the way humans do, they do have ways of getting the meaning of a piece of text. Headings are one possibility, bold and italic are another way to emphasize a word or a couple of words that are important. Search engines read the <b> and <i> text and get the idea that what is in bold and/or italic is more important than the rest of the text. But do not use bold and italic too much – this will spoil the effect, rather than make the whole page a search engine favorite.
Duplicate Content YES and NO
When you get new content, there is one important issue – is this content original “new one time written”? Because if it is not, in example if it is stolen from another site, this will get you into some big trouble. But if it is not illegal, in example you will obtain it for free from an article feed, have in mind that you might not be only one doing this in the Web. If you have the rights to do it, you can change the text a little, so it is not an exact copy of another page and cannot be labeled as “Duplicate Content” from Search Engines. If you don’t manage to escape the duplicate content filter that search engines have imposed recently in their attempts to filter stolen, scrapped, or simply copied contents, your pages could be permanent removed from search results!
Duplicate content became an issue when tricky webmasters started making multiple copies of the same page (under a different name) in order to fool search engines that they have more content than they actually do. As a result of this malpractice, search engines responded with a duplicate content filter that removes suspicious pages. Unfortunately, this filter sometimes removes quite legitimate pages, like product descriptions given from a manufacturer to all its resellers, which must be kept exactly the same.
You see, duplicate content can be a serious problem. But it is not an obstacle that cannot be overcome. First, you need to periodically check the Web for pages that are similar to yours. If you now find to much simularitys you should change a little the text on your site, hoping that this way you will avoid the penalty you get for duplicate content. Even with product descriptions, you can add commentary or opinion on the same page and this could be a way out.
Images are not for Search Engines
Search engines have no means to index directly extras like images, sounds, flash movies, javascript. Instead, they rely on your to provide meaningful textual description and based on it they can index these files. In a sense, the situation is similar to that with text 10 or so years ago – you provide a description in the metatag and search engines uses this description to index and process your page. If technology advances further, one day it might be possible for search engines to index images, movies, etc. but for the time being this is just a dream.
Images
Images are an essential part of any Web page and from a designer point of view they are not an extra but a most mandatory item for every site. However, here designers and search engines are on two poles because for search engines every piece of information that is buried in an image is lost. When working with designers, sometimes it takes a while to explain to them that having textual links (with proper anchor text) instead of shining images is not a whim and that clear text navigation is really mandatory. Yes, it can be hard to find the right balance between artistic performance and SEO-friendliness but since even the finest site is lost in cyberspace if it cannot be found by search engines, a compromise to its visual appearance cannot be avoided.
With all that said, the idea is not to skip images at all. Sure, nowadays this is impossible because the result would be a most ugly site. Rather the idea is that images should be used for illustration and decoration, not for navigation or even worse – for displaying text (in a fancy font, for example). And the most important – in the <alt> attribute of the <img> tag, always provide a meaningful textual description of the image. The HTML specification does not require this but search engines do. Also, it does not hurt to give meaningful names to the image files themselves rather than name them image1.jpg, image2.jpg, imageN.jpg. For instance, in the next example the image file has an informative name and the alt provides enough additional information: <img src=“one_month_Jim.jpg” alt=“A picture of Jim when he was a one-month puppy”>. Well, don’t go to extremes like writing 20-word <alt> tags for 1 pixel images because this also looks suspicious and starts to smell like keyword-stuffing.
Animation and Movies
The situation with animation and movies is similar to that with images – they are valuable from a designer’s point of view but are not loved by search engines. For instance, it is still pretty common to have an impressive Flash introduction on the home page. You just cannot imagine what a disadvantage with search engines this is – it is a number one rankings killer! And it gets even worse, if you use Flash to tell a story that can be written in plain text, hence crawled and indexed by search engines. One workaround is to provide search engines with a HTML version of the Flash movie but in this case make sure that you have excluded the original Flash movie from indexing (this is done in the robots.txt file but the explanation of this file is not a beginners topic and that is why it is excluded from this tutorial), otherwise you can be penalized for duplicate content.
There are rumors that Google is building a new search technology that will allow to search inside animation and movies and that the .swf format will contain new metadata that can be used by search engines, but until then, you’d better either refrain from using (too much) Flash, or at least provide a textual description of the movie (you can use an <alt> tag to describe the movie).
Frames
It is a good news that frames are slowly but surely disappearing from the Web. 5 or 10 years ago they were an absolute hit with designers but never with Search Engines. Search engines have difficulties indexing framed pages because the URL of the page is the same, no matter which of the separate frames is open. For search engines this was a shock because actually there were 3 or 4 pages and only one URL, while for search engines 1 URL is just 1 page. Of course, search engines can follow the links to the pages in the frameset and index them but this is a hurd for them to do.
If you still insist on using frames, make sure that you provide a meaningful description of the site in the <noframes> tag. The following example is not for beginners but even if you do not understand everything in it, just remember that the <noframes> tag is the place to provide an alternative version of your site for search engines and users whose browsers do not support frames. If you decide to use the <noframes> tag, maybe you’d like to read more about it before you start using it.
For Example do it like that: <noframes><p>This site is best viewed in a browser that supports frames. </p><p> Welcome to our site for prospective music lovers! You find the Music you search for from Classic to Rock, Heavy Mettal and Punk</p></noframes>
JavaScript
This is another hot potato. It is known by everybody that pure HTML is powerless to make complex sites with a lot of functionality (anyway, HTML was not intended to be a programming languages for building Web applications, so nobody expects that you can use HTML to handle writing to a database or even for storing session information) as required by today’s Web users and that is why other programming languages, in example JavaScript, or PHP come to enhance HTML not to kill it – Use them bit whisely.
For now search engines just ignore JavaScript they encounter on a page. As a result of this, first if you have links that are inside the JavaScript code, chances are that they will not be spidered. Second, if JavaScript is in the HTML file itself, this clutters the html file itself and spiders might just skip it and move to the next site. Just for your information, there is a <noscript> tag that allows to provide alternative to running the script in the browser but because most of its applications are pretty complicated, it is hardly suitable to explain it here.
Search Engines like URL`s a lot
Based on the previous reading, you might have gotten the impression that the search engine algorithm try to destroy every designer effort to make a site gorgeous and nice. Well, it has been explained why search engines do not like image, movies, applets and other extras. Now, you might think that search engines are far too cheeky to dislike dynamic URLs either. Honestly, users are also not in love with URLs like http://domainname.com/product.php?cid=1&pid=5 because such URLs do not tell anything about the contents of the page.
There are a couple of good reasons why static URLs score better than dynamic URLs. First, dynamic URLs are not always there. For example the page is generated on request after the user performs some kind of action. In a sense, such pages are nonexistent for search engines, because they index the Web by crawling it, not by filling in forms.
Second, even if a dynamic page has already been generated by a previous user request and is stored on the server, search engines might just skip it if it has too many question marks and other special symbols in it. Once upon a time search engines did not index dynamic pages at all, while today they do index them but generally slower than they index static pages.
The idea is not to revert to static HTML only. Database-driven sites are great but it will be much better if you serve your pages to the search engines and users in a format they can easily handle. One of the solutions of the dynamic URLs problem is called URL rewriting. There are special tools that rewrite URLs in a friendlier format, so they appear in the browser like normal HTML pages. Try the URL Rewriting Tool below, it will convert the cryptic text from the previous example into something more readable, like http://mydomainname.com/product-categoryid-x-productid-x.
We also use this technik and it works with a Content Management System. At this Point a great thank to the JOOMLA Community, without them we would be nothig
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