Placing your pages

For search engines, where you say something is almost as important as what you are saying. Start your page with a headline formatted using the <h1> or <h2> HTML tags. This helps your visitors to quickly see what the page is about. I am not talking about a tabloid style “Three headed baby ate my cat” but something relevant to your page content. Try and include a keyword or keyword variant or two if it can stay readable. This reinforces your keyword relevance for the search engine by indicating that you are highlighting this topic for your site visitors.

The page content should use your keyword vocabulary as often as possible without detracting from the flow and readability of the page. Cramming keywords into your content might be great for search engines, but if it makes your site visitors choke, then you are not doing yourself any favours. Where possible, use variations on your core vocabulary including plurals of key terms and positioning of words in your key phrases. If you focus on <city> <product> as a phrase, and someone searches for <product> <city>, you are less likely to show up.

It is also important to use industry, product, or segment vocabulary so that your site will have a wide net. This goes back to my example of our site ranking very well for an obscure phrase that hardly anyone ever searched for. It got us a lead though that we would not have had if I had not gone into exhaustive detail about features and capabilities of our product. Creating good content takes time and money but content is what gets indexed and search engines bring in traffic.

Using images to layout text creates a nice visual effect and gives you precise control over font and positioning, but the text cannot be indexed by the search engines. If you do use images that contain text, make sure you use the ALT tag to replicate the text contained in an image. All your images should contain keyword dense ALT text. When linking between pages on your site, use keywords in your link text. Most search engines pay attention to the context of the links into your pages. If a link is coming to your page from a related site with a strong page rank, then it is worth more than a link coming in from a generic directory listing. The same applies for what the link actually says when it is linking to you. It is common to see things like “We make the best widget for your fuzzy grapnelflabs. Learn more! “ which is great if you want the search engines to give weight to the keyword relevance for “learn more”. But it would make more sense and be more useful to make the link phrase something like.

“Learn more about the best widget for your fuzzy grapnelflabs.” The search engine will then know that the page is about fuzzy grapnelflab widgets. Another important part of search engine ranking is how you name your files. Search engines index the full URL of your pages so use your keywords in your directory and page names. For example, a URL of www.joesgrapnelflabs.com/fuzzygrapnelflabs/widgets.htm is more search engine friendly than if the content was located at “/catalog/fgw.htm”.

Some content management systems pull your data from a database using variables. Your page file name might be “template.php?id=46”. This does not tell the search engines anything about the page. More sophisticated CMS’s allow you to specify a file name and path for the content which will help with your search engine placement.