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February 4, 2002
Search engine spiders want to read the text on your pages, and
especially the introductory text near the top of the page. This
mirrors the way human beings assess pages — by reading
them, starting at the top.
Here are some guidelines to keep text-hungry spiders happy:
- Provide text. Pages without text rarely gain high rankings.
This is especially important for home pages. If there's no text
on the opening page then the spider might stop right there and
not even bother to look at the rest of your site. It's one reason
for avoiding Splash pages at the front end. Ideally you should
provide at least 150 words of text on your home page.
- Make full use of early paragraphs to include relevant
keywords. Most search engines place emphasis on early text, and
less on the words further down the page. The numbers vary from
engine to engine, but you can assume the first 50 words are
crucial, the next 50 are important, the 50 following are likely
to be read. After that, it's anybody's guess, though some engines
do manage to fully index pages with more than a thousand words.
Try to get your important keywords — the expressions you
expect your visitors to use in their searches — included in
your first 150.
- Don't overdo any repetition. If you repeat your keywords too
often, you could be penalized. There's no magic number to aim
for, but if you repeat keywords three times or less, you should
be safe.
- Concentrate on the main text. You might have a separate top
table (perhaps containing an advert and logo) plus a left hand
column with links. These will appear in the HTML file before your
main, central text block. There's a temptation to think these
areas are more important than the main text area because spiders
read them first. If these outlying areas contain a lot of text
(unlinked) then this may well be true. But many engines try to
ignore peripheral HTML blocks, especially if they're heavy on
links, and head straight for the center. It's not too difficult
for them to do. They simply look for the largest title (within
<h> tags) on the page and assume that whatever follows that
is the most important text area.
- It's not much use getting your keywords in the right place if
you've chosen the wrong ones. It doesn't help the spiders either.
They'd prefer you to choose the right keywords so their indexing
works as intended. It's worth spending a few hours on deciding
your keywords, maybe trying out a few expressions in the search
engines and seeing if they deliver the sites you want to compete
with.
- Spiders have lists of stop words — mainly related to
adult content and profanity. When they find one of these words
they may abandon your site altogether. If you have a page that
includes a possible stop word, hide it from spiders by making it
an exclusion in your robots.txt file (see later). Also watch out
for words that have two meanings, one of which is sexual. Spiders
don't understand context.
- If you have pages full of links, make sure there's plenty of
text to accompany them. Pure link listings are often ignored by
spiders, but if you add a couple of sentences describing each
link, the problem disappears.
Popular Sites are Exceptions
Often you can learn a few tricks by looking at the most popular
sites on the Web and seeing how they do things. But not in this
case. The most popular sites are given a special status by search
engines and indexed under slightly different rules than regular
sites. They are more likely to be indexed thoroughly and
frequently, which means they don't have to try as hard. Also,
because it's assumed they won't try to spam the engines, they're
forgiven the occasional mistake, such as overusing a keyword.
Titles and Filenames Count
Spiders like to see useful page titles, and some also appreciate
relevant filenames. It helps them, but unfortunately the
mechanism has been abused, so they're wary. Try to use filenames
and page titles that match your text content and keywords, rather
than using them to cover keywords that don't otherwise get a
mention. Words in filenames can be separated by an underscore
— this is a convention that IT professionals used before
the Internet arrived, so it's perfectly acceptable. But if your
filenames turn into a long sequence of keywords, spiders will
assume you're trying to spam them.
Meta Tags
These go in the file header, in two sections — keywords and
description. The meta tag system has been so heavily abused that
some engines simply ignore them. But it's still worth spending a
few minutes on creating them for the engines that remain
interested. Keep them short and don't use words that are missing
from the main text. If you spend a long time working on meta
tags, you're probably trying to manipulate the system and you may
well be found out. Create them quickly, using the simplest, most
obvious content, and it's more likely they'll work as intended.
Making Your Pages Easy for Search Engines to Index
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