A Brief Digression on Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization

• Search Engines use the visible content on a webpage as well as some information hidden from the reader to direct people to the desired pages.

• Thus it is useful to include some of this information.

Title• A page’s title does appear in the browser. If nothing else

the title-tag contents will be used to display the search engine’s results.

Meta-tags

• HTML allows for meta-tag elements in the head.

• They have no effect on the page’s content or on how the page is displayed. Their purpose is to supply additional information used by search engines for example.

• Some meta-tags have been abused in the past and it is not clear that they are used by search engines.

Keywords

• There are a few standard values for a meta-tag’s name attribute, one being “keywords”. For example<meta name="keywords" content=“La Salle University, Academic

Computing & Technology" />

• Keywords has been abused and may have become less important. However, – Have it– Keep it short– Don’t repeat words (or variations on words)

Description

<meta name=“description" content=“Welcome to La Salle University Academic Computing & Technology" />

• Another standard is the description meta-tag as shown above. The description should be brief and should correlate with the keywords. – Don’t repeat words within the keywords meta-tag, – But do use your keywords in the description.– Correlate description with page’s title and possibly the

content of <h1> header tags.

Other meta-tags

• There are other meta-tags and the claim is that they are not used by the likes of Google and Yahoo but may be used by special purpose search engines. For example,<meta name=“author" content=“Tom Blum" />

Links

• Some search engines are based on “spiders” that “crawl” the web following all of the links.

• A measure of a page’s importance is how many other pages link to it.

• So linking each page back to some main page can help with both navigation and search engine recognition of the main page.

A picture is worth …

• Along with the title, and meta-tags, a search engine will look at the web page’s content.

• But what if some of the content is contained in an image?

• Image tags have an alt attribute to allow for a brief description of the image. Use them. – Use of the alt tag is also relevant to accessibility

issues, such as making the page meaningful to readers like JAWS.

Keep it simple

• Using external, linked CSS keeps a page short and simple and easier to search for content.

• Using basic tags like <h1> for headers indicates important content. (You can use CSS to make them look however you want.)

• Avoiding excessive use of Flash – its content is not searchable

Robots

• If you want your page to be ignored by the search engines, there is the robots meta-tag. <meta name=“robots” content=“noindex” />

• There are variations like “nofollow” as well as a robots.txt file one can place in the domain root.

"I never said, 'I want to be alone.' I only said, 'I want to be left alone.' There is all the difference."

References

• http://searchenginewatch.com/showPage.html?page=2167931

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_tag

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

• http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=40349&topic=8522