Okay, we've discussed how Google and the other search engines pay extra
attention to things like the contents of the <title> tag. But what I haven't discussed is
the importance of the structure of the <body> of your webpages.
If you've read the previous articles on this website, you should start
to see a pattern emerge: Search Engines Use Linear Thinking. That is, they cannot and
do not try to intuit the value of every word on your webpages. They rely instead on some
pretty simple, straightforward methods.
When a search engine starts to analyze a page for ranking it for a
given search term, they start with the obvious - the HTML tags which present a hierarchical
structure to the site's content and its focus. So, the content of the page's <title>
tag and the <h1> and <h2> tags are given extra weight. Similarly, phrases that
are enclosed in <b>old or <i>talics are also weighted above plain text.
But Google in particular also pays attention to the physical location of
the words within the document in assigning weight. That is, the Google algorithm assumes that
information that appears near the start of the document is more important than the information
that appears near the end of the document. This has some important implications in how
you structure the HTML documents that comprise your website in order to get higher search
engine rankings.
If you examine the HTML source of a page on a typical website, the first
thing you'll notice is the enormous amount of clutter that is in the document's <head>
section way before you ever see any of the text that a human user would see when he was
viewing the page in a browser.
The legacy of the Myth of the <META> tag still haunts many
web designers. You'll often see a Keywords <META> tag stuffed with dozens of keywords,
including past tense, future tense, past tense possessive, plurals, and singular variations
on the site's keywords. Don't make yourself crazy here. For your main page, five or six
broad-term keywords in this tag are plenty. Let your interior pages bear the burder of more
specific keywords and phrases. The only <META> tags your webpages need are (1) Description,
(2) Keyword, (3) Content-type, and (optionally) (4) Robots. All of the rest are superfluous as
far as search engines are concerned and only serve to obsure the content of your webpage.
Remember: think linear - heirarchically, like a pyramid or family tree, top-to-bottom.
Then there is the Dreaded Dreamweaver® Effect. Dreamweaver® by Macromedia, Inc.® is
a powerful tool for creating attractive webpages. Unfortunately, several of the special
effects it provides - like rollovers or drop-down menus - cause it to insert a large amount
of JavaScript on every page that uses them. All commonly-used JavaScript functions should
be moved off-page into a separate file. This not only improves your search engine results
by reducing the clutter that stands between the top of the document and the important content,
it also reduces the burden on your server and speeds things up for users since the common
JavaScript file only has to be downloaded once per visit.
Similarly, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) <style> settings in the
<head> section of your documents should be taken off-page moved into separate
files. Half the benefit of style sheets is the ability to change the look and feel of an
entire document with a single setting. Moving those settings to a common file just extends
that capability to your entire website while simultaneously providing a bit of a boost to your
search engine ranking.
English-speaking geeks with stilted artistic vision like me are left-to-right
oriented linear thinkers and their webpages reflect that pattern. The navigation menu is always
along the top just under a logo graphic, or banged up against the left edge of the page. Depending
on the complexity of the menu, this can put a great deal of keyword-poor clutter between the physical
start of the HTML file and the keyword-rich content you want search engines to focus on. So start
imagining the top section of your main page with the menu in a different location - say, for
example, along the right edge of the page or along the bottom of the top-most section. Just
think of how much sooner the spiders will see your keywords if they didn't have to wade through
fifteen rollover links or pop-up menus to get to them.
So the theme here is, to borrow a phrase, "Don't Bury The Lead." That
means removing unnecessary clutter from the <head> section, putting your most important
information in the first paragraph or two of your document's HTML source (regardless of layout
and design issues which can be handled through DHTML controls), and not trying to make your
main page bear the burden of snaring traffic for all of your website's keywords.
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