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| Optimize your web pages
When you have found the right keywords for your web site, you have to optimize your web pages for high search engine rankings. Only optimized web pages can have good search engine rankings. Optimizing your web pages involves two steps: · you should optimize your web pages for your important keywords· you should make sure that the HTML code of your web pages is error freeOptimizing your web pages for your keywords makes sure that your web pages can be found for these keywords. Checking the HTML code of your web pages makes sure that search engines can parse your web pages. Submitting your web site to search engines is pointless if your web pages aren't optimized for search engines. Most likely, your web site will be listed at position 14,527 or search engines may not even index it at all. Most search engines display 10 results on the first page, and relatively few searchers click through to look at the second page. According to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, "Users almost never look beyond the second page of search results." Danny Sullivan, ClickZ Search Engine Marketing Columnist, puts it this way: "Being listed on position 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your web site." For that reason, optimizing your web pages is a very important step in your web site promotion campaign. | ||||||||||||||
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General optimization tipsIn addition to the advice of IBP's Top 10 Web Page Optimizer, the following tips and techniques can help you to improve the ranking of your web site: 1. Don't use frames If at all possible, avoid frames. Many search engines have difficulty with frames and it is very difficult to get high search engine rankings for web sites that use frames. Google says about frames: "Reasons your site may not be included: Your page uses frames. Google supports frames to the extent that it can. Frames tend to cause problems with search engines, bookmarks, emailing links and so on, because frames don't fit the conceptual model of the web (every page corresponds to a single URL). If a user's query matches the site as a whole, Google returns the frame set. If a user's query matches an individual page on the site, Google returns that page. That individual page is not displayed in a frame -- because there may be no frame set corresponding to that page."Yahoo has a similar statement: "Yahoo! Slurp follows HREF links. It does not follow SRC links. This means that Yahoo! Slurp does not retrieve or index individual frames referred to by SRC links."Don't use frames on your web site if you want to have high search engine rankings! 2. Avoid Flash and other multimedia elements Most search engines cannot index Flash pages. The normal text content on your web pages matters most to search engines. If you must use Flash on your web site, make sure that you also offer normal text for the search engines. 3. Don't use welcome pages Some web pages use a "Welcome to our web site" image with a link to the actual site as the index page for the web site. Don't do this. Some search engines might not follow the link on the welcome page. In addition, most web surfers don't like these welcome pages. 4. Avoid dynamically created web pages Databases and dynamically generated pages are great tools to manage the contents of big web sites. Imagine having to manage the Web site contents of the New York Times without databases. Unfortunately, dynamically generated Web pages can be a nightmare for search engine spiders because the pages don't actually exist until they are requested. A search engine spider is not going to be able to select all necessary variables on the submit page. Some search engines can index dynamically pages to a point, but even Google states that they have problems with dynamically created pages: "Reasons your site may not be included in Google: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index."4. Make sure that you allow search engine robots to index your site Imagine you're an Internet marketing service company and you keep trying very hard to get top rankings in the search engines for your customer. Even after several weeks, the customer's web site hasn't been listed in any search engine. Then you start to realize that the search engine spiders and robot programs cannot access the web site because your customer blocks them because the robots.txt file is not properly configured. 5. Make sure that search engine spiders can access your web site Search engine spiders don't have the functionality of full-fledged Web browsers such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox or Netscape Navigator. In fact, search engine robot programs look at your Web pages like a text browser does. They like text, text, and more text. They ignore information contained in graphic images but they can read <IMG ALT> text descriptions. This means that search engine spider programs are not able to use Web browser technology to access your site. If your Web pages require Flash, DHTML, cookies, JavaScript, Java or passwords to access the page, then search engine spiders might not be able to index your Web site. 6. Avoid special characters in your URL Most search engines have problems indexing web pages when their URLs contain special characters. The following special characters are known to be "search-engine-spider-stoppers": * ampersand (&) * dollar sign ($) * equals sign (=) * percent sign (%) * question mark (?) These characters are often found in dynamically generated Web pages. They signal the search engine crawler program that there could be an infinite loop of possibilities for that page. That's why some search engines ignore web page URLs with the above characters. 7. Choose a reliable and fast hosting service Your web page should be hosted by a reliable hosting service. Otherwise, it could happen that your web server is down when a search engine spider tries to index it. If your web site fails to respond when the search engine's index software program visits your site, your site will not be indexed. Even worse, if your web site is already indexed and the search engine spider finds that your site is down, you'll possibly be removed from the search engine database. It's essential to host your web site on servers that are very seldom down.Search engine crawler programs that index Web pages don't have much time. There are approximately 4-6 billion Web pages all over the world and search engines want to index all of them. So if the host server of your Web site has a slow connection to the Internet, you may experience that your Web site will not be indexed by the major search engines at all. You may also want to limit the size of your homepage to less than 60K. It'd also benefit the still numerous users that connect to the Internet with a slow modem. For even the casual Internet user, the performance of a Web site can make the difference between pleasure and frustration. The importance of valid HTML code Many webmasters overlook a very important aspect of web site promotion: the validity of the HTML code. What is valid HTML code? Most web pages are written in HTML. As for every language, HTML has its own grammar, vocabulary and syntax, and every document written in HTML is supposed to follow these rules. Like any language, HTML is constantly changing. As HTML has become a relatively complex language, it's very easy to make mistakes. HTML code that is not following the official rules is called invalid HTML code. Why is valid HTML code important? Search engines have to parse the HTML code of your web site to find the relevant content. If your HTML code contains errors, search engines might not be able to find everything on the page. Search engine crawler programs obey the HTML standard. They can only index your web site if it is compliant with the HTML standard. If there's a mistake in your web page code, they might stop crawling your web site and they might lose what they've collected so far because of the error. Although most major search engines can deal with minor errors in HTML code, a single missing bracket in your HTML code can be the reason if your web page cannot be found in search engines. If you don't close some tags properly, or if some important tags are missing, search engines might ignore the complete content of that page. How can you check the validity of your HTML code? Select the "HTML validator" in IBP's main window. IBP will connect you to an official HTML validator that will check the code of your web pages. Although not all HTML errors will cause problems for your search engine rankings, some of them can keep web spiders from indexing your web pages. | |||||||||||||||
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þ Things you should have done:1. Does your web site consist of at least six individual web pages? 2. Does each of these web pages contain at least 200 words of visible text? 3. Do your web pages contain so much text content that it is easy for web surfers and search engines to find out what your web site is all about? 4. Are your web pages linked so that search engines and web surfers can find all web pages of your web site through the links on other pages of your site? 5. Do you have optimized at least four of your web pages for your keywords? Each web page should not be optimized for more than one or two keywords or key phrases. 6. Have you made sure that the HTML code of your web pages is valid so that search engines don't have difficulty when they try to index your web site? 7. Have you removed frames wherever possible on your web site? It is very difficult to get high search engine rankings with a web site that uses frames. 8. Have you made sure that you don't use a welcome page or intro page on your web site? Many search engines won't be able to index your site if you use such a page. 9. Do you use as few Flash elements as possible? Search engines cannot index them properly. 10. Have you added some optimized static pages if your web site is dynamically created? Many search engines have difficulty with dynamically created web pages. 11. Do your web pages look attractive to human web surfers although they are optimized for search engines? 12. Would you go to your web site instead of a competitor web site if you were a web surfer? 13. Does your web site have its own domain name and is it hosted on a fast and reliable web server? 14. Could you tick all yes-boxes in the Find the right keywords checklist in the previous chapter?Important It is important that you read the contents of the previous chapters. If you overlook something, your web site optimization efforts might not work as expected. · What can happen if you do not optimize your web pages?If you do not optimize your web pages then search engines might not be able to index your pages. In addition, they might not be able to find our what your web pages are about. If you submit your web site to search engines without optimizing your pages first then you won't get high search engine rankings. · What can happen if you optimize only one web page of your site?It will be very difficult to get high search engine rankings if you have only one optimized web page. Search engines take your complete web site into account. If you have many web pages that are optimized for different but related keywords than search engines will think that your web pages are relevant to a special topic. Relevant web pages get better search engine rankings. For that reason, you should optimize as many pages as possible for different but related keywords. · What can happen if you don't check the HTML code of your web pages?Some HTML errors can prevent search engines from indexing your web pages. If your web pages have such an HTML error, you won't get listed on search engines because search engines cannot index your pages.
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