What kind of attention span does a search
engine spider have? It depends. Some have
the patience to dig deep into your site and
promise to follow every link. Others may
get bored before they finish indexing a
whole page. Carefully organize your page
content and Web site to ensure that spiders
index the whole thing - not just bits and
pieces.
Make Your Points Early And Well
Human visitors want to see your most
important content at the top of the page,
highlighted if necessary with color and
header tags. But realize that spiders
see the page differently than human
visitors.
Search engine spiders look at your content
and assume that:
- Earlier content is more
important than what's farther
down on the page.
- Text contained in header
tags is more important than
other text.
- Links and header tags that
contain keywords matching the
META tag keywords are more
important than those that
don't.
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These used to be a very important component
of all search engine algorithms, but lately
has been overshadowed by other ranking
criteria like link
popularity and themes.
Don't ignore them though: they still
affect your rank on many engines and help
boost you above competing sites.
Put Your Content On Top
Even if visitors see your content on top of
the page in their browsers, spiders might
not find it if your HTML code is poorly
written. If so, your best keywords
and keyword phrases may be the last
thing the spider reads.
Some design techniques that work great for
human visitors leave spiders out in the
cold. Make them more spider-friendly like
this:
- External JavaScript
files: Complex JavaScript
code inserted in the document's
HEAD tag takes up a huge amount
of space. Use an external
JavaScript file to reduce page
size or place your JavaScript
code at the bottom of the page
whenever possible.
- Cascading Style
Sheets: Use style sheets
to reduce bloated code and
decrease download time. Style
sheets eliminate extraneous
HTML code, so the spider can
get straight to your
content.
- Tables: Keep your
table structure as simple as
possible. Some spiders tend to
get lost in a web of nested
tables where the content is
buried deep inside a complex
table structure.
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Be particularly careful if you're using a
WYSIWYG editor:
- Bloated HTML code:
This is a problem with many WYSIWYG
editors. It's easy to
forget what's happening to your
HTML code when you're cutting
and pasting text and images
without writing any actual code
yourself.
Microsoft Office users often
don't think they need an HTML
editor at all: they can select
the Save as Web option on their
File menu and convert
it into an HTML document.
But all those files are big
(really big!) and almost
impossible to hand edit
later.
- Editor-generated
JavaScript: Many editors
let you include basic
JavaScript effects like drop-down
menus and rollovers
automatically. While easy,
this method also writes big
code. A simple rollover event
that takes a few lines to hand
code might be 10 times that
size if it's editor-generated.
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Once all visitors (human and spider) see
your content up front, it's time to
consider the overall structure of your
site, not just individual page layout and
coding.
Flatter Is Better
Try to design your site with as few levels
as possible. Too many sites have this sort
of structure:
| Level
1: |
Splash
page with a "click here to
enter" link. |
| Level
2: |
Home page
with little content other
than navigation links. |
| Level
3: |
Products
page whose only content is
a list of product
categories. Visitors click
on the category that
interests them. |
| Level
4: |
Specific
product categories with
keyword-rich descriptions
of each product. |
|
Visitors have to wait for 3 or more pages
to load before ever finding the information
they want, while search engine spiders
search through multiple pages before
finding good content to index.
A splash
page adds an extra level to your Web
site, pushing all of your other content
down one level. This increases the chance
that both humans and spiders will miss it.
Keep your home page short, but make it
content-rich. Reference major topics and
include important keywords, then link them
to keyword-rich 2nd and 3rd-level pages for
more information. A simple "Products" link
in your navigation menu doesn't help either
human or spider visitors. Also include a
"Products" paragraph that briefly lists the
type of items you sell:
"We offer the Web's largest selection of
premium cat food, dog food, dog
grooming supplies, and pet toys!"
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Make sure that your keyword phrases
"premium cat food, pet toys, etc." all link
to the internal site pages that discuss
them more completely. This gives spiders a
direct link to your important content and
it can help your overall page rank because
some ranking algorithms place more weight
on keywords contained in links.
Deep Submit Your Pages
But do you really need to worry about how
many site levels you have? Most of the
major search engines now boast that they do
a "deep crawl" on all Web sites they visit
and therefore index the entire site.
That's not always the case however. Most
crawl down a few levels deep into your site
and then they're off to the next site.
Search engines claim to index hundreds of
millions, even billions of pages. With
numbers that size, it's likely that they're
going miss a few important pages here and
there.
Probably when you started promoting your
Web site, you submitted your home page to
the top search engines and waited for the
spiders to visit and crawl your site.
That may not be good enough. If you use a
technique called deep
submit, you don't just hope the spiders
find your internal pages; you actually
submit those too!
This is where an automated search engine
submission tool becomes helpfull. Use it to submit any page in your site to
your choice of 100 search engines.
Don't risk being overlooked. Design a site
that appeals to both humans and search
engine spiders, then use deep submit to
achieve good search engine exposure for
your whole site, not just a page or two.
