from
Computer World volume 20, Number 21 by
Alan K'necht on Oct. 15th, 2004.
To get visitors to come to your site via search engine results (SERPs), you need to rank in the top 20 - if not the top 10 - for searches on spcific keywords/phrases that your firm is targeting. While writing search engine-friendly content is out of the control of the Web development team, there is a lot you can do to optimize your site markup for search engines. Here are 10 tips to help you mark-up your code properly.
Tip 1. The first rule of SEO is not to design your site in such a way that the code itself prevents a search engine bots/spiders from being able to index the site. The bottom line: don't build a web site entirely in Flash if you want any traffic from search engines.
Tip 2. To find out what a spider sees on your site, run a spider simulator on a given page. The simulator will show you what text the spider sees and what links it finds. Here is
the one.
Tip 3. Each website should have a file called robots.txt, which tells the spiders what directories they should not spider.
Tip 4. Determine the main topic of the page and use it as the page title.
Tip 5. Write a unique description meta tag for each page - something you should ask the content provider to give you.
Tip 6. Put all your JavaScripts in external files and link to them. You will be increasing the ratio of content to code on your page, which helps make your message clearer to search engines and you will be making your markup cleaner and website management easier.
Tip 7. Search engines love content that appears in header tags (h1, h2, etc.) yet very few website actually use them.
Tip 8. Don't spend time creating JavaScript mouseovers, trying using the hover feature of CSS instead. If, for specific reasons, you can't use CSS, then repeat the menu options at the bottom of the page with plain text.
Tip 9. Avoid unnecessary tables where possible. Limit your table embedding to a depth of three. Where possible avoid the whole table thing and start using XHTML with div tags and CSS to define position.
Tip 10. Use either or to mark up important words on your page.
By following this basic outline, you'll be creating search engine-friendly pages. The search engine bots will easily index your pages, and with important words and phrases appropriately tagged; those words will receive proper valuation by the search engines.