Optimize Website Structure and the Search Engines Will Follow
One of the biggest sources of traffic on the web is Google and Yahoo and their network. It makes sense that a website owner is interested in building traffic to their websites would take some time to learn how Search Engines looks at the page before they index it for public.
I have listed a few facts that can really help to optimize each web-page and avoid some common mistakes.
HTML size
Page size matters because search engines limit size of a cached page. For example, Google will only cache a full page if the size of its HTML is less than 101 Kb (images and external scripts are not included). Yahoo! caches text of up to 500 Kb per page. This means if your HTML page is too large, search engines will not cache the full page, and only the top part of the text will be searchable.
To reduce the size of HTML file you can use CSS to declare the positioning and appearance.
Last modified
This attribute shows how old the document is. It is taken from the server response to HTTP request. You can see if your page has been updated lately.
Same color text and background
It’s not a good idea to hide the keywords on a webpage to increase its occurrence. If the color of the text on a page is close to the background color, the text becomes almost invisible. As a rule, this technique is employed to populate a page with keywords without damaging its design. Since it is considered as spam by most search engines, I suggest that you do not try it.
Tiny text
If a page uses Cascading Style Sheets and there are fonts smaller than 4 pixels, they are reported as tiny texts. Most search engines consider tiny texts as an abusive practice - this is why you should avoid using them.
Immediate keyword repeats
The same keyword repeated one after the other a few times, for example best personal loans on-line, personal loans, loans, personal loans, personal loans is a questionable trick. For this example, there will be three repetitions reported, because the keyword was placed three times in a row after it was used first. Such repetitions are considered as spam by most search engines.
Frames
Not all search engines support frames, i.e. can follow from a frameset page to content frames and index texts. If your website consists of frames, and you cannot redesign it, you can solve this problem by putting the content of an optimized page with links to other pages into a <NOFRAMES> HTML tag.
External and Internal JavaScript
Do not use too many embedded scripts on the page, because your keyword prominence will be reduced, and thus your page will be ranked lower on search engines. I suggest putting the script in an external file or move it as close to the closing <Body> tag as possible.
File robots.txt allows spiders to crawl the pages
Robots.txt is a text file placed in the root directory of a website to tell robots on how to spider the website. Only robots that comply with the Robots Exclusion Standard will read and obey the commands in this file.
Robots.txt is often used to prevent robots from visiting some pages and subdirectories not intended for public use. However, if you want search engine robots to spider your site, there should not be disallowing commands included within this file for all or particular search engine robots.
I’ve been using these techniques on my websites and I see all my web-pages are indexed. I hope you will get advantage of these techniques.
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I’m in the process of creating the Robots.txt (which is a bit too late heh heh)
If I put my blog in a sub directory (…/blogs) , should I put the the Robots.txt on the root or on the /blogs?
Robots.txt file should be on the root and if you want to restrict search engines to crawl a specific folder e.g. (/admin), you can use the command below:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin
You can also use Google Webmaster Tool (http://www.google.com/sitemaps) to manage your web-pages. Use the Remove URL Tool if you want to remove some pages from Google..
Follow the link below for more information:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=61062&hl=en
Let me know if you need any further help.
Thanks,
Mohit
Good point. I was wondering, do you think javascript in the head section affects the keyword density? I had just assumed it would only matter if it were embeded in the body section? Thanks.
Jasons last blog post..Give Browser Specific CSS Files With PHP
Hi Mohit!
Thanks for the infos. I’d definitely be looking forward to your more SEO tips and tricks. If you can also cover more off-site tutorials, that will definitely much appreciated!
Keep up the great work!
Christie Lyles last blog post..Why is Keyword Research so Important?
Great article, well structured, if only all people blogged like you!