Optimizing Sites for Search Engine
Placement
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to see it fall, has it really fallen? If no one can find your site, then you are like that
unobserved tree. All your work in creating a great site that is the perfect host for lucrative advertising content will be in vain. You certainly
won't make money from your site.
I've already explained how you generate traffic by publicizing your site and getting inbound links to it. Provided these
inbound links don't come from bad neighborhoodssites set up just to exchange linksthe more inbound links your site has, the higher its
PageRank . A higher PageRank implies a better search result ranking for a given query.
You can also generate traffic by using advertising such as the Google AdWords program
Besides obtaining inbound links and advertising your site, there are some things you can do when you construct your web sites and web
pages that can help your pages with their search order ranking. On the other hand, there are also some things you can do that will harm
your prospects.
The general field of constructing web sites and pages to helpand not harmtheir chances with search engines is called search engine
optimization, or SEO, and is the subject of a certain amount of mystification, perhaps to justify the high consulting rates that SEO experts
can charge.
In reality, SEO is pretty simple, and involves the following steps:
You need to understand how your pages are viewed by search engine software.
You should take common-sense steps to make sure your pages are optimized from the viewpoint of these search engines.
Fortunately, this essentially means practicing good design, which makes your sites easy to use for
human visitors as well.
You need to avoid certain over-aggressive SEO practices, which can get your sites blacklisted by the search engines.
How Your Site Appears to a Bot
To state the obvious, before your site can be indexed by a search engine, it has to be found by the search engine. Search engines find
web sites and web pages using software that follows links to crawl the Web. This kind of software is variously called a crawler, a spider, a
search bot, or simply a bot (bot is a diminutive for "robot").
You may be able to short circuit the process of waiting to be found by the search engine's bot by
submitting your URL directly to search engines
To be found quickly by a search engine bot, it helps to have inbound links to your site. More important, the links within your site should
work properly. If a bot encounters a broken link, it cannot reach, or index, the page pointed to by the broken link.
Images
Pictures don't mean anything to a search bot. The only information a bot can gather about pictures comes from the alt attribute used within
a picture's tag and from text surrounding the picture. Therefore, always take care to provide description information via thealt along with
your images and at least one text-only link (for example, outside of an image map) to all pages on your site.
Links
Some kinds of links to pages (and sites) simply cannot be traversed by a search engine bot. The most significant issue is that a bot cannot
log in to your site. So if a site or page requires a username and a password for access, then it probably will not be included in a search
index.
Don't be fooled by seamless page navigation using such techniques as cookies or session identifiers. If
an initial login was required, then these pages probably cannot be accessed by a bot.
Complex URLs that involve a script can also confuse the bot (although only the most complex dynamic URLs are absolutely
nonnavigable). You can generally recognize this kind of URL because a ? is included following the script name. Here's an example:
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Colophon. Pages reached with this kind of URL are dynamic,
meaning that the content of the page varies depending upon the values of the parameters passed to the page generating the script (the
name of the script comes before the ? in the URL). In this example URL, the parameters are passed to ther esources.php script as name=value
pairs separated by ampersands (&). If the topic parameter were changedfor example, to topic=Equipment using the URL
http://www.digitalfieldguide.com/resources.php?set=313312&page=2&topic=Equipmenta page with different content would open.
File Formats
Most search engines, and search engine bots, are capable of parsing and indexing many different kinds of file formats. For example,
Google states that "We are able to index most types of pages and files with very few exceptions. File types we are able to index include:
pdf, asp, jsp, html, shtml, xml, cfm, doc, xls, ppt, rtf, wks, lwp, wri, swf."
However, simple is often better. To get the best search engine placement, you are well advised to keep your web pages, as they are
actually opened in a browser, to straight HTML. Note a couple of related issues:
A file with a suffix other than .htm or .html can contain straight HTML. For example, generated .asp, .cfm, .php, and .shtml files
often consist of straight HTML.
Scripts (or include files) running on your web server usually generate HTML pages that are returned to the browser.
Optimizing Sites for Search Engine
