Examining Your Pages For SEO
Examining Your Pages
Making your Web pages “search engine–friendly” was probably not uppermost in your mind when you sat down to design your Web site. That means your Web pages — and the Web pages of millions of others — probably have a few problems in the search engine–friendly category. Fortunately, such problems are pretty easy to spot; you can fix some of them quickly, but others are more troublesome.
Using frames
In order to examine your pages for problems, you need to read the pages’ source code; remember, I said you’d need to be able to understand HTML! In order to see the source code, choose View➪Source in your browser.
When you first peek at the source code for your site, you may discover that your site is using frames. (Of course, if you built the site yourself, you already know whether it uses frames. However, you may be examining a site built by someone else.) You may see something like this in the page:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
</HEAD>
<FRAMESET ROWS=”20%,80%”>
<FRAME src=”navbar.html”>
<FRAME src=”content.html”>
</FRAMESET>
<BODY>
</BODY>
</HTML>
When you choose View➪Source or View➪Page Source in your browser, you’re viewing the source of the frame-definition document, which tells the browser how to set up the frames. In the preceding example, the browser creates two frame rows, one taking up the top 20 percent of the browser and the other taking up the bottom 80 percent. In the top frame, the browser places content taken from the navbar.html file; content from content.html goes into the bottom frame.
Framed sites don’t index well. The pages in the internal frames get orphaned in search engines; each page ends up in search results alone, without the navigation frames with which they were intended to be displayed.
Framed sites are bad news for many reasons. Here are a few quick fixes:
- Add TITLE and DESCRIPTION tags between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags. (To see what these tags are and how they can help with your frame issues, check out the next two sections.)
- Add <NOFRAMES> and </NOFRAMES> tags between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags, and place 200 to 300 words of keyword-rich content between the tags. The NOFRAMES text is designed to be displayed by browsers that can’t work with frames, and search engines will read this text, although they won’t rate it as high as normal text (because many designers have used NOFRAMES tags as a trick to get more keywords into a Web site, and because the NOFRAMES text is almost never seen these days, as almost no users have browsers that don’t work with frames). Include a number of links, in the text between the NOFRAMES tags, to other pages in your site to help search engines find their way through.
