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Search Engine Optimization Myths and Techniques
There are many myths and misconceptions regarding how to optimize your website for Search Engines. We will attempt to present the main methods to prepare your site for the modern Search Engine.
META Tags
Meta Tags are HTML tags in the header section of a webpage. They are not normally displayed to humans via a web browser, but are used by the browser itself, or by search engines or other spidering software. They can contain commands such as a refresh time, weather or not to index the page, and other commands. The most important commands to this discussion are the description and keywords tags. These were originally intended to be used to augment the indexing mechanism of Search Engine's, by providing a specific short description of the page, as well as a set of relevant keywords to aid in searching.
However, this mechanism was soon (badly) exploited by unscrupulous web designers to artificially raise their websites ranking. As a result, practically no Search Engine's honour the META Tags at all, and those that do, assign very low scores to them. Occasionally, heavy use of META tags can even reduce your websites ranking.
Submitting your website via software
There are a myriad of software applications that claim to submit your website to "10,000 search engines!" Unfortunately, there aren't 10,000 search engines. The top 10 Search Engine's receive by far the largest amount of traffic, with the top couple (Google, Yahoo, MSN) far outweighing the rest. What these programs do is submit your site to what is known as "Link Farms". Link Farms are automated pages of links, not true search engines. These link farms are rarely ever visited by humans, but are often visited by spammers trying to harvest email addresses. Even worse, many of the top Search Engine's will actively refuse machine-submitted web sites, due to spamming and the sheer number of submissions.
Tricking the Search Engine to gain ranking.
There are many methods tried over the years to try to get around the loss of the META Tags, or to just trick the Search Engine's into raising the ranking of your site. Examples include
- Hidden Text – There are various methods to hide text. Make the text the same colour as the background, hide it under an image, make the size so small its invisible, etc. However, Search Engine's are onto most of this, and will penalize a website for using it.
- Keyword flooding – This involves using a set of keywords on your pages as much as possible. However, overuse is seen as spamming by Search Engine's, and again, your site will be penalized for this technique.
- Submitting to Search Engine's will result in your website being listed in a few days.
This is of course not true. Search Engine spiders are quite busy, and have a lot of sites to index, not just new sites, but they must occasionally go over old sites to make sure they still exist, and that their information is up to date. In addition, some Search Engine's are human-operated, and each link must be checked by hand before it is added. It can take several weeks for your site to show up on Search Engine's. It may not even be listed at all.
Things to do to improve your website.
There are various things you can do to your website to improve it, from a Search Engine's perspective. Remember, a Search Engine is just a computer program, and has limited ability to understand a page. Making things easier for it will help you in the long run.
The most important thing that a Search Engine looks at is the <title> tag. This is given the
most weight in the page ranking, and should contain your main keywords. However, do not just include them
in a list, as this can be viewed as spamming. Try to include them in natural logical sentences or
descriptions. It is also good to make sure each page has a unique <title> tag, as this is viewed
favourably by Search Engine's, and also allows you to include more keywords.
Nearly as important is the Heading tags (<h1>, <h2> etc). These
should be used logically, and as section headers (as they were intended). The <h1> tag should only
appear on the page once, and is normally used a the unique title for that page. The other heading tags can
be used more than once, and should be used in a hierarchical structure (ie, <h3> should only be used
under an <h2>, which is under an <h1>, etc ).
The other main part of making a good website is, the content. This is the meat of what the search engine indexes. Basically, if you want a good website, it needs good content. If your website has lots of lists, table, charts and the like, this won't mean much to a search engine, so you should be sure to include some paragraphs of regular text, preferably containing some of your (relevant) keywords. This will give the SE something to "bite on", and something to index and gather keywords from.
On a related note, some search engines (notably Google), assign a higher ranking to sites that update with fresh content regularly and often.
Conclusion
In conclusion, you cannot "trick" your way to the top of the rankings. Produce a good website design with quality content, and it will come.