Search Engine Tips
Top 5 Tips for Writing Web Pages That Get Found
1 - Word location
To make your web pages more visible to web crawlers, make sure that you use the
words you want to search on in prominent places.
This means, put the words in the
<TITLE>, in the main header(s)
<H1> and in subsequent
<H2> etc. headers.
The search engines use these as very important indicators that the words in the
phrases describe the page. The main body of the web page is also indexed but
the words used there are not so highly scored. Some search engines also increase
the score for emphasised text (bold, italic) but this not a reliable method.
2 - Separate Your Topics
If you want to make available information on several different
topics, write individual pages (or trees of pages) for each of them.
This makes best use of your content and allows the web crawlers to
best identify individual topics by the words in the pages, and
additionally, shorter web pages are generally returned as more
relevant since the number of words is higher compared to the
total number of words in the page.
3 - Relevance and Links
Get other people to link to your pages.
This is important because it lets people and web crawlers find
them. This is expecially relevant for Google -
http://www.google.com/ - which
uses the citation model for calculating relevancy. If other people
link to your page using the search words in the link text, Google
will make it more relevant. Google is used by Netscape's search
amongst others.
However, the CS web site is regularly visited by robots so as long
as your page is linked from there - e.g. your home page, it will be
indexed within a few weeks.
4 - Metadata
Use Metadata in your document.
Some web crawlers use this to aid ranking of results and it is useful
in retrieval because the description meta tag is often used in providing
a more legible display of results.
The most important meta tags to provide are keywords and description.
For example this page includes:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Search Engine Tips: Top 5 tips for writing web pages that get found. University of Kent at Canterbury.">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Search Engine, web pages, finding, title, meta, links, frames, images, keywords, description, University of Kent, UKC, Kent, Canterbury">
For more information on using metadata http://dublincore.org
5 - Restrictions
Do not use these features: -
- Frames
- Image maps
- Invisible / tiny text
- Meta refresh
- Lots of repeated keywords
The web crawlers ignore some of these and see the others as
attempts to Spam the search engines and may penalise or remove the
page completely from the search.
See also: -
Search Engine Features For Webmasters:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/features.html
