a brief digression on search engine optimization (seo)
Post on 13-Dec-2015
216 Views
Preview:
TRANSCRIPT
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
top related