Web Optimization Strategies

You don’t necessarily have to pick through the HTML code for your Web page to evaluate how search engine–friendly it is. You can find out a lot just by looking at the Web page in the browser. Determine whether you have any text on the page. Page content — text that search engines can read — is essential, but many Web sites don’t have any page content on the front page and often have little or any on interior pages. Here are some potential problems:

• Having a (usually pointless) Flash intro on your site

• Embedding much of the text on your site into images, rather than relying on readable text

• Banking on flashy visuals to hide the fact that your site is light on content

• Using the wrong keywords; explains how to pick keywords If you have these types of problems, they can often be time consuming to fix.

(Sorry, you may run over the one-hour timetable by several weeks.) The next several sections detail ways you might overcome the problems.

Eliminating Flash

Huh? What’s Flash? You’ve seen those silly animations when you arrive at a Web site, with a little Skip Intro link hidden away in the page. Words and pictures appear and disappear, scroll across the pages, and so on. You create these animations with a product called Macromedia Flash.
I suggest that you kill the Flash intro on your site. They don’t hurt your site in the search engines (unless of course you’re removing indexable text and replacing it with Flash), but they don’t help either, and I rarely see a Flash intro that actually serves any purpose. In most cases, they’re nothing but an
irritation to site visitors. (The majority of Flash intros are created because the Web designer likes playing with Flash.)

 

Replacing images with real text

If you have an image-heavy Web site, in which all or most of the text is embedded onto images, you need to get rid of the images and replace them with real text. If the search engine can’t read the text, it can’t index it.
It may not be immediately clear whether text on the page is real text or images. You can quickly figure it out a couple of ways:

 

• Try to select the text in the browser with your mouse. If it’s real text, you can select it character by character. If it’s not real text, you simply can’t select it — you’ll probably end up selecting an image.
• Right-click the text — if you see menu options, such as Save Image and Copy Image — then you know it’s an image, not text.

Using more keywords

The light-content issue can be a real problem. Some sites are designed to be light on content, and sometimes this approach is perfectly valid in terms of design and usability. However, search engines have a bias for content; that is, for text they can read. In general, the more text — with the right keywords — the better.

 

Using the right keywords in the right places

Suppose that you do have text, and plenty of it. But does the text have the right keywords? The ones discovered with the Google AdWords Keyword Tool earlier in this chapter? It should.
Where keywords are placed and what they look like is also important. Search engines use position and format as clues to importance. Here are a few simple techniques you can use — but don’t overdo it!
_ Use particularly important keywords — those that people are using to search for your products and services — near the top of the page.
_ Place keywords into <H> (heading) tags.
_ Use bold and italic keywords; search engines take note of this.
_ Put keywords into bulleted lists; search engines also take note of this.
_ Use keywords multiple times on a page, but don’t use a keyword or keyword phrase too often. If your page sounds really clumsy through overrepetition, it may be too much.

 

Ensure that the links between pages within your site contain keywords. Think about all the sites you’ve visited recently. How many use links with no keywords in them? They use buttons, graphic navigation bars, short little links that you have to guess at, click here links, and so on. Big mistakes. I don’t object to using the words click here in links. Some writers have suggested that you should never use click here because it sounds silly and people know they’re supposed to click. I disagree, and research shows that using the words can sometimes increase the number of clicks on a link. The bottom line is that, for search engine purposes, you should rarely, if ever, use a link with only the words click here in the link text; you should include keywords in the link.
When you create links, include keywords in the links wherever possible. If, on your rodent-racing site, you’re pointing to the scores page, don’t create a link that says To find the most recent rodent racing scores, click here or, perhaps, To find the most recent racing scores, go to the scores page. Instead, get a few more keywords into the links, like this: To find the most recent racing scores, go to the rodent racing scores page. That tells the search engine that the referenced page is about rodent racing scores.