InformIT: Sams Teach Yourself HTML 4 in 24 Hours > Providing Hints for Search Engines

Providing Hints for Search Engines

Fact: There is absolutely nothing you can do to guarantee that your site will appear in the top 10 search results for a particular word or phrase in any major search engine (short of buying ad space from the search site, that is). After all, if there were, why couldn't everyone else who wants to be number 1 on the list do it, too? What you can do is avoid being last on the list and give yourself as good a chance as anyone else of being first.

Each search engine uses a slightly different method for determining which pages are likely to be most relevant and should therefore be sorted to the top of a search result list. You don't need to get too hung up about the differences, though, because they all use some combination of the same basic criteria. The following list includes almost everything any search engine considers when trying to evaluate which pages best match one or more keywords. The first three of these criteria are used by every major search engine, and all of them also use at least one or two of the other criteria.

Do the keywords appear in the <title> tag of the page?
Do the keywords appear in the first few lines of the page?
How many times do the keywords appear in the entire page?
Do the keywords appear in a <meta /> tag in the page?
How many other pages in my database link to the page?
How many times have people chosen this page from a previous search list result?
Is the page rated highly in a human-generated directory?

Clearly, the most important thing you can do to improve your position is to consider what word combinations your intended audience is most likely to enter. I'd recommend that you not concern yourself with common single-word searches; the lists they generate are usually so long that trying to make it to the top is like playing the lottery. Focus instead on uncommon words and two- or three-word combinations that are most likely to indicate relevance to your topic. Make sure those terms and phrases occur several times on your page, and be certain to put the most important ones in the <title> tag and the first heading or introductory paragraph.

Note

Some over-eager Web page authors put dozens or even hundreds of repetitions of the same word on their pages, sometimes in small print or a hard-to-see color, just to get the search engines to sort that page to the top of the list whenever someone searches for that word. This practice is called search engine spamming.

Don't be tempted to try this sort of thing—all the major search engines immediately delete any page from their database that sets off a "spam detector" by repeating the same word or group of words in a suspicious pattern. It's still fine (and quite beneficial) to have several occurrences of important search words on a page. Make sure, however, that you use the words in normal sentences or phrases, and the spam police will leave you alone.

Of all the search engine evaluation criteria just listed, the use of <meta /> tags is probably the most poorly understood. Some people rave about <meta /> tags as if using them could instantly move you to the top of every search list. Other people dismiss <meta /> tags as ineffective and useless. Neither of these extremes is true.

A <meta /> tag is a general-purpose tag you can put in the <head> portion of any document to specify some information about the page that doesn't belong in the <body> text. Most major search engines allow you to use <meta /> tags to give them a short description of your page and some keywords to identify what your page is about. For example, your automatic cockroach flattener order form might include the following two tags:

<meta name="description"
 content="Order form for the SuperSquish cockroach flattener." />
<meta name="keywords"
 content="cockroach, roaches, kill, squish, supersquish" />

The first of these tags ensures that the search engine has an accurate description of your page to present on its search results list. The second slightly increases your page's ranking on the list whenever any of your specified keywords are included in a search query.

You should always include <meta /> tags with name="description" and name="keywords" attributes in any page that you request a search engine to index. Doing so may not have a dramatic effect on your position in search lists, and not all search engines look for <meta /> tags, but it can only help.

TIP

In the unlikely event that you don't want a page to be included in search engine databases at all, you can put the following <meta /> tag in the <head> portion of that page.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

This causes some search robots to ignore the page. For more robust protection from prying robot eyes, ask the person who manages your Web server computer to include your page address in his or her robots.txt file. (She or he will know what that means and how to do it.) All major search spiders will then be sure to ignore your pages.

To give you a concrete example of how to improve search engine results, consider the page in Figures 23.1 and 23.2. This page should be fairly easy to find since it deals with a specific topic and includes several occurrences of some uncommon technical terms for which people interested in this subject would be likely to search. However, there are several things you could do to improve the chances of this page appearing high on a search engine results list.

Figure 23.1 There's nothing wrong with this page, but it presents some problems to people who might try to find it from an Internet search site.

Figure 23.2 The first part of the page in Figure 23.1, as it appears in a Web browser.

The contents of the page in Figures 23.3 and 23.4 look to a human being almost the same as the page in Figures 23.1 and 23.2. To search robots and search engines, however, these two pages appear quite different. The following list summarizes the changes and explains why I made each modification:

Figure 23.3 This page will be easier for people interested in fractals and chaos to find than the page in Figure 23.1.

Figure 23.4 The first part of the page in Figure 23.3, as it appears in a Web browser.

I added some important search terms to the <title> tag and the first heading on the page. The original page didn't include the word fractal in the first heading—a key position.
I added <meta /> tags to assist some search engines with a description and keywords.
I added an alt attribute to the first <img /> tag. Not all search engines read and index alt text, but some do.
I took out the quotation marks around technical terms (such as "fractal" and "iterated") because some search engines consider "fractal" to be a different word than fractal. I could have used the HTML character entity " to make the quotation marks, in which case the search robot would have disregarded them, but I chose instead to simply italicize the words.
I added the keyword fractal twice to the text in the order form box. I also rearranged the table so this box didn't appear in the HTML code before the <h1> heading or the main body text. Since search sites give special importance to words occurring early in the HTML document, it's important not to put table columns (or <script> or <style> tags) before the text containing your most important search words.

It is impossible to quantify how much more frequently people searching for information on fractals and chaos were able to find the page in Figure 23.3 versus the page in Figure 23.1, but it's a sure bet that none of the changes could do anything but improve the page's visibility to search engines. As is often the case, the improvements made for the benefit of the search spiders probably made the page's subject easier for humans to recognize and understand as well.

Note

If you read the popular science and computer magazines, you have probably found claims that XML, the "HTML of the future," will make it much easier to find what you're looking for on the Internet. You might be wondering how to get the Web pages you create hooked up to this magical new searching miracle.

The good news is that XML will indeed eventually make online searching easier and more efficient. You'll read more about how XML works and how it achieves this and other goals in Hour 24, "Planning for the Future of HTML." The bad news is that neither XML nor its young offspring, XHTML, can make it any easier for people to find your pages today or even this year.

While you're waiting for The Next Big Thing to hit, you might want to keep an eye on future developments in Web searching by stopping by the Search Engine Watch site at http://www.searchenginewatch.com every month or so.

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