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Search Engine Tip:
Search Engines Like Ugly Pages
by Tom Dahm,
Chief Operations Officer,
NetMechanic, Inc.
Want to improve your search engine ranking? Then try to keep search engines in mind when you design your site. That's important, because many of the page layout techniques used today can ruin your search engine ranking.
For small to medium-sized Web sites, search engines are the most important source of traffic. Unfortunately, getting noticed in the search engines isn't an easy job. You can spend months getting your site listed in an engine, only to find it ranks 50th in your search results.
Why does your page rank so badly? Each search engine uses its own rules when determining how relevant your web page is to a particular search query. As a result, it's hard to give universal tips for improving your search engine ranking. In general, though, your page will rank well for a particular query if the search terms appear in your TITLE tag, your META tags, and in the body of your page.
That's pretty much Search Engine 101 for most webmasters. If your site is all about "search engine tips," then you need to put these words in your TITLE, your META Keywords list, your META Description, and then use them a few times in the body of your page.
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"...insert your keywords at the very top of your page" |
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Unfortunately, when it comes to putting your keywords in the page body, it's not quite that simple. When the search engines review your page, most of them don't check the entire document. Instead, they check only the first few hundred characters of text. After all, the logic goes, if the words "search engine tips" really are the subject of your Web site, they should appear near the top of the page, right?
Unfortunately, when you use HTML tables to control the layout of your Web page, that's usually not the case. Instead the HTML code used to define your header and navigation sections may push your content area far down into the source document. As a result, your keywords may be so deep inside your HTML code that the search engines won't notice them.
For example, consider a Web page designed with this common layout: a masthead showing a logo, a left navigation bar, and finally a content area that includes the words "search engine tips."
A webmaster submitting the page to a search engine would want it to score well in any queries for the words "search engine tips." Unfortunately, the HTML code for the logo and the left navigation bar usually come before the content section of the page, pushing the keywords down the page. So many search engines won't even read these words within the body of the page.
If that's the case, why don't some search engines look deeper into web pages? The reason is that most of the major search engines were developed in the days before HTML tables were used to control layout. In the earliest days of the Internet, Web pages followed a simple, one column layout that placed the content right at the top of the HTML source. For whatever reason, as HTML tables became a common layout tool, some search engines never changed their rules to look deeper into the page.
So what can you do? The easiest solution is to insert your keywords at the very top of your page. Unfortunately, that may ruin the look of a site you spent weeks developing.
Another approach is to use Doorway or Gateway pages that are specifically designed for submission to search engines. Since these pages are designed to get a high score in the search engines, you can redesign your layout so that keywords appear near the top of the page.
If you chose this approach, be aware that some search engines consider this practice to be "spamming" and may penalize you. Other engines recognize this practice and permit it, so long as you stay within limits.
The best approach, however, is to keep search engine optimization in mind while you develop the layout of your pages. While designing your page, leave enough room to insert keywords near the top of the page, perhaps integrating them into your masthead next to your site's logo. If you can manage that, you'll have the best of both worlds: a nice-looking Web page that ranks well in the search engines.
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