Making Your Pages Easy for Search Engines to Index
February 4, 2002
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Achieving high rankings for Web sites on search engines has
become a black art. Cloaks, repetitive chanting, hidden rubrics,
squeaky doorways and voracious spiders all play their part. But
there is an alternative approach. How about creating pages that
present search engine spiders with the information they want?
Manipulating meta tags and image Alt descriptions can saddle you
with a ranking penalty. It's the text near the top of the page
that you need to spend your time on.
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Voodoo
First, let's dispense with the zombies and headless chickens. Many
companies and experts offer methods of deceiving search engine
spiders to gain high rankings. And a few of these methods even
work — at least for a while.
On the other side of the front line are the search engines
themselves, engaged in a perpetual battle to identify these
techniques, commonly known as spamming, and penalize the sites
that use them because they distort search results. And of course
the search engines want the sole right to do that themselves,
through accepting payments for high rankings, but that's another
story.
Often the techniques used by spamming experts backfire —
they're spotted and punished by low rankings. Even more often,
the same techniques are attempted by regular webmasters, who are
not dedicated search engine experts and can't keep up with the
progress of the battle, so they get wiped out soon after the
opening credits. As a small example, just renaming your pages
with spider-friendly filenames, without changing their content,
can get them demoted in the rankings.
The easiest way to avoid this virtual war is to step aside and
provide the search engines with what they want and observe their
rules. Few sites manage to do this, and yet it's both effective
and "legal".
The Time Element
There will be no instant results. Getting a good search engine
ranking takes time. That's one of the best ways to identify
charlatans from real experts. Anybody who promises instant
gratification is in the voodoo business.
Search engines do not publish their precise methods of working,
but most anecdotal evidence points to the importance of time.
They simply do not trust new sites to deliver the goods. Also the
engines are oversubscribed and have too many sites to index, so
they're prone to dropping new sites from their listings on the
grounds that many young sites are destined not to reach maturity,
so it would be silly to take them too seriously while they're
still in diapers.
You need to allow six months to a year for a decent search engine
strategy to work. It will then continue to work for a long time,
with minimal effort. But in the first few months it might not be
a star performer. If your site doesn't provide what visitors want
to see then it might never perform at all, but once again, that's
a different story.
During the first year of promoting a new site, you may have to
resubmit your site a number of times because it's repeatedly
dropped by the search engines. That's fine. It's part of the
game. They're just checking that you're serious.
You may also experience long delays between submission and actual
listing. Look at the details provided by the search engine when
you make your submission — often they'll tell you how long
the delay will be. Allow a few weeks extra, to be on the safe
side, before resubmitting.
All your submissions should be done manually, and it's a good
idea to keep a record of them so you don't bug specific engines
too often. If you do, you will be penalized. Automatic submission
systems ("With one keystroke register your site with 1,500 search
engines!") are for suckers. The search engines quickly identify
them and ignore them, or, worse still, punish the sites that use
them.
Spiders are Machines
Spiders (or robots) are software programs the search engine
companies create to trawl the Web and index sites. They create
massive databases that the engines then use to return search
results.
They follow rules of logic, impeccably, and have no flexibility.
They have no idea what your site really looks like, nor do they
have a sense of humor. It's highly unlikely that a real human
will look at your site as part of the indexing process. The
exception is when you apply for a listing with a directory such
as Yahoo!.
When designing your site, it's important to remember that it will
be read by machines. This means, for example, if you turn all
your major page headings into graphics, the spiders won't be able
to recognize where your main heading are and identify the core
text areas that follow, even though this would pose no problem
for a human viewer.
On the other hand, if you go all out for machine-readability, you
may well get the thumbs-down from a Yahoo reviewer, who has no
interest in how your pages appear to a machine. It's all a
question of balance.
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