Google's Prohibitions

Avoiding Overly Aggressive SEO Practices

Google,
and
other major search engines, urges you to avoid overly aggressive SEO
practices when
you build your site.

I've
primarily covered Google in this chapter, but what applies to Google
also
applies for the most part to the other major search engines.

Here's
why
you avoid being overly aggressive with SEO (besides wanting to avoid
Google's disapproval).
Building sites that get highly ranked is simply a matter of common
sense; just
build a site that will be useful to people, and it will naturally get
indexed
correctly. Taking this viewpoint, you shouldn't concern yourself with
search
order ranking or search engine optimization when you construct your
site. Just create
worthwhile content that is genuinely useful, interesting, or
entertaining.

Google's
Prohibitions

Below is a list of the
techniques
that Google considers bad behavior. Google prohibits these things
because it
considers them

overaggressive and deceptive,
but
note that Google does not consider this list exhaustive and will frown
on
anything new that you come up with if it is considered deceptive to
either
humans or the Googlebot, even if it is not on this list.

According to Google, good
search-engine-citizen web sites do not:

Employ hidden text or links

For example, users cannot read
white
text on a white background (and will never even know it is there). But
this
text will be parsed by the search engine. This rule comes down to
making sure
that the search engine sees the same thing that users view.

Cloak pages

Also called stealth, this is a
technique that involves serving different pages to the search engine
than to
the user.

Use redirects in a deceptive way

It's easy to redirect the
user's
browser to another page. If this is done for deceptive purposesfor
example, to
make users think

they are on a page associated
with a
well-known brand when in fact they are on a web spammer's pageit's
frowned
upon.

Attempt to improve your PageRank with dubious
schemes

Linking to web spammers or bad
neighborhoods on the Web may actually hurt your own PageRank (or search
ranking), even if doing so provides inbound links to your site.

Bad
neighborhoods are primarily link farms or link exchanges sites that
exist
solely for the purpose of boosting a site's inbound links without other
content. Web spammers are sites that disguise themselves with pseudo
descriptions and fake keywords; the descriptions and keywords do not
truly
represent what the site contains.

Bombard Google with automated
queries

This
wastes
Google's bandwidth, so it doesn't like it.

Practice keyword loading

This
is the
practice, beloved by SEO "experts," of adding irrelevant words to
pages (the page can then be served as the search result based on a
query for
the irrelevant words that actually don't have anything to do with the
page
content).

Create multiple similar pages

Google
frowns on the creation of pages, domains, and subdomains that duplicate
content.

Present "doorway" pages

Pages
created just for search engines are sometimes called doorway pages .
(The term
covers a variety of techniques that are used to substitute one page for
anothereither by redirection or actual substitution of pages on the web
serverwhen the first page is optimized for specific keyword searches
and the
page to which the user is actually sent has little or nothing to do
with that
search.)

Pages that lack content

Google
frowns on pages that lack original content, such as a page that exists
simply
to present affiliate links.

Create domains with the intention
of confusing users

Likely
you've landed on a site with a domain name that's confusing because
it's
sharing the same name with a different

Google
frowns on deceptive domain naming if the domain name was selected for
the
purpose of taking advantage of the confusion.

Any other deceptive technique

As Google puts it, spending
your
energy creating a good user experience will let you "enjoy better
ranking
than those who spend their time looking for loopholes they can exploit."

You
should think of this list as applying to all major search engines, not
just
Google, even though Google is the search engine that is enlightened
enough to
clearly spell these prohibitions out. For more information, see
Google's
Information for Webmasters: http://www.google.com/webmasters

At
the very least, web sites constructed using the dirty tricks on
Google's no-no
list will be penalized by legitimate search engines.

If you are a webmaster, you've
likely
been approached to pay for search engine optimization services. A great
many of
these SEO pitchesalthough they seem very plausibleare scams. Caveat
emptor.
Legitimate SEO companies cannot do more for you than the steps outlined
in this
chapter,and any representations that they can are probably fraudulent.

Pages and Keywords

Pages and Keywords

By
now, you
probably understand that the most important thing you can do on the SEO
front
involves the words on your pages.

There
are three issues you need to
consider when placing keywords on a page:

How many words should be on a page?

Which words belong on what page?

Where should these be placed on the
page?

Page size

Ideally,
pages should be between 100 and 250 words. If it is shorter than 100
words,
Google and other search engines will tend to discount the page as a
lightweight. In addition, you want to include as many keywords as you
can
without throwing the content off-kilter.

With
less than 100 words, any
significant inclusion of keywords is going to look like keyword
stuffinga
verboten practice.

There's
nothing wrong with creating pages that are longer than 250 words.
However, from
the viewpoint of hosting lucrative advertising, lengthy pages waste
content;
250 words is about as many as will fit on a single monitor screen, so
your
visitors will have to scroll down to finish reading the rest of the
page if you
publish longer pages. You
might as well provide navigation to
additional pages for the content beyond the 250 words and gain the
benefit of
having extra pages to host advertising.

Choosing keywords

Beyond
the
mechanics of crafting sites and pages that are search engine friendly
lies
another issue: what search queries does your site answer? You need to
understand this to find the keywords to emphasize in your site
construction, a
very important part of search engine optimization.

It's
likely
that you'll want to vary keywords used in a page depending on the page
content,
rather than trying to stuff a one-size-fits-all approach into all the
pages on
your site.

If
the
answer is X, for example, what is the question? This is the right way
to
consider keyword choice. X is your web site or web page.

What
did
someone type into Google to get there?

As
you come
up with keywords and phrases, try them out. Search Google based on the
keywords
and phrases. Are the results returned by Google where you would like to
see
your site? If not, tweak, modify, wait for Google to re-index your site
(this
won't take too long once

you've
been
initially indexed) and try your search again.

Ultimately,
the best way to measure success is relative. It's easy to see how
changes
impact your search result ranking: just keep searching (as often as
once a day)
for a standard set of half-a-dozen keywords or phrases that you've
decided to
target. If you are moving up in the search rankings, then you are doing
the
right thing. If your ranking doesn't improve, then reverse the changes.
If you
get search results to where you want them (usually within the top 30 or
even
top 10 results returned), then start optimizing for additional keywords.

You
should
also realize that the success that is possible for a given keyword
search
depends upon the keyword. It's highly unlikely that you will be able to
position a site into the top 10 results for, say, "Google" or
"Microsoft," but trivial to get to the top for keyword phrases with
no results.

The
trade-off here is that it is a great deal harder to do well with
keywords that
are valuable, so you need to find a sweet spot: keywords where you
stand a
chance but that also will drive significant site-related traffic.

In a
society where feedback is ultimately
determined by financial incentive, an interesting approach to keyword
selection
is to see what words cost the most to advertisers. If you are
registered with
Google AdWords, you can use the AdWords tools to do just that and get
cost

estimates
for keywords and phrases

Keyword placement

The
text on your web page should include the most important keywords you
have
developed in as unforced a way as possible. Try to string keywords
together to
make coherent sentences.

Not
all text on a page is equal in importance. Generally speaking, besides
including them in the body of the page itself and in meta information,
you
should try to place your keywords in the following elements, presented
roughly
in order of descending importance:

Title

Putting
relevant keywords in the HTML title tag for your page is probably the
most
important single thing you can do in terms of SEO.

Headers

Keyword
placement within HTML header styles, particularly headers toward the
top of a
page, is extremely important.

Links

Use your
keywords as much as possible in the text that is enclosed by hyperlink
tags on
your site in outbound and crossbound links. Ask webmasters who provide
inbound
linking to your site to use your keywords whenever possible.

Images

Include your
keywords in the alt attribute of your HTML image tags.

Bold

If there is
any reasonable excuse for doing so, include your keywords within HTML
bold tags.

_{Keywords
higher up in a given page
get more recognition from search engines than the same keywords further
down a
page.}

_{Keyword
placementsometimes called keyword
stuffing seems simple enough conceptually. You take the most
significant
keywords and place them in the HTML elements of your page that I've
just
highlighted. But looking at an actual example may help you understand
what}

_{you
need to do.}

_{To show
you an example of keyword
placement, I've turned to an SEO competition. SEO competitions take a
nonsense
phrase that, to start with, yields no Google search results when
entered as a
query. (The words that make up the nonsense phrase can be real words.)
At}

_{the end
of a given time period, the
site that is first in Google's search results wins the contest.}

_{Obviously,
keyword placement is not
the only technique employed by contestants, who also try to maximize
inbound
links. But keyword placement is an extremely important part of search
engine optimization,
as these contests prove, and one which you can easily implement.}

Linking

Linking

The
links on your site constitute a
very important part of how Google and other search engines will rank
your
pages.

Links
can be categorized into
inbound links , outbound links, and cross links :

Inbound links

These
links point to a page on your
web site from an external site somewhere else on the Web.

Outbound links

These
links point from a page on
your site to an external site somewhere else on the Web.

Cross links

These
links point between the pages
on your site.

Broken Links

It's
quite important to a search engine that none of the links on your site
is
broken . It shouldn't be that big a problem to go through your site and
check
to make sure each link works manually. Doing this will also give you a
chance
to review your site systematically and understand the navigation flow
from the
viewpoint of a bot.

Even
though you've checked your links manually, you
should also use an automated link checking tool. Quite a few are
available. A good
choice is the simple (and free) link checker provided by the World Wide
Web
Consortium (W3C) at http://validator.w3.org/checklink
. As you can see in the figure, all you need to
do
is enter the domain you want checked and watch the results as the links
in your
site are crawled. After you've checked your links manually, use an
automated
link checking tool such as the W3C's Link Checker to make sure your
site has no
broken links .

Inbound links

You
want as
many inbound links as possible, provided these links are not from link
farms or
link exchanges. With this caveat about

inbound
linking from "naughty neighborhoods" understood, you cannot have too
many inbound links. The more popular, and the higher the

ranking,
of
the sites providing the inbound links to your site, the better.

PageRank
and Inbound Links

Inbound
links are considered a
shorthand way of determining the value of your web site, because other
sites
have decided your site has content worth linking to. An inbound link
from a
site that is itself highly valued is worth more than an inbound link
from a
low-value site, for obvious reasons.

This
concept is at the core of
Google's famous PageRank algorithm, used to order search results.
However, the PageRank
algorithm by now has more than 100 variables (the exact nature of which
are a
deep and dark secret); many factors besides a recursive summation of
the value
of a site's inbound links do come into play.

Outbound links

The
"everything in moderation" slogan is really apt when it comes to
outbound links. You could also say that the "outbound link giveth and
the
outbound link taketh." Here's why: you want some respectable outbound
links to establish the credibility of your site and pages and to
provide a
useful service for visitors. After all, part of the point of the Web is
that it
is a mechanism for linking information, and it is truly useless to
pretend that
all good information is on your site. So on-topic outbound links are
themselves
valuable content.

However,
every time your site provides an outbound link, there is a probability
that
visitors to your site will use it to surf off your site. As a matter of
statistics, this probability diminishes the popularity of your site,
and Google
will subtract points from your ranking if you have too many outbound
links. In
particular, pages that are essentially lists of outbound links are
penalized.

Cross links

Cross
linkslinks within your siteare important to visitors as a way to find
useful,
related content. For example, if you have a page explaining the concept
of
class inheritance in an object-oriented programming language, a cross
link to
an explanation of the related concept of the class interface might help
some
visitors. From a navigability viewpoint, the idea is that it should be
easy to
move through all information that is topically related.

From
an SEO
perspective, your site should provide as many cross links as possible
(without
stretching the relevance of the links to the breaking point). There's
no
downside to providing reasonable cross links, and several reasons for
providing
them. For example, effective cross-linking keeps visitors on your site
longer
(as opposed to heading offsite because they can't find what they need
on your
site).

In
addition, from the perspective of making money with site advertising,
you want
to have dispersal through your site. One page that gets 100 visitors is
much
less lucrative than 100 pages that each gets one visitor. The aim of
effective
cross-linking should be disperse traffic throughout the pages of
relevant
content on your site.

Creating a Sit with Seo in Mind

Creating
a Site with SEO in Mind

The
saying
"Everything in moderation, even moderation" is a good principle to
keep in mind when you tweak your web site to achieve

SEO.
The
moderation slogan has been aptly applied to many human activities, from
the
sexual to the gustatory and beyond. It fits very

well
with
SEO.

For
example, you want a nice density of keywords in your pages, but you
don't want
so many keywords that the content of your pages is

diminished
from the viewpoint of visitors. Search engines look for keywords, but
they take
away points for excessive and inappropriate

keyword "stuffing."

Put
Meta Tags in an Include

If
your
site is large, with many pages, and has several distinct areas of
content, you
can create a separate file, each

consisting
only of meta description and tags, for each content area.

You
can
always customize the meta information for a specific page by discarding
the
reference to them eta include file and

adding
page-specific meta information. Alternatively, you can create a
page-specific
meta include, keeping track of your meta

includes
by
placing them all in one directory and devising a sensible naming
convention.

It's
a
really good idea to have default meta information for a site that can
easily be
tweaked.

Site
Design Principles

Here
are some
design and information architecture guidelines you should apply to your
site to
optimize it for search engines:

Eschew fancy graphics

For
most
sites, the fancy graphics do not matter. If you are looking for search
engine
placement, it is the words that count

Use text wherever possible

Use
text
rather than images to display important names, content, and links.

Always provide alt attributes
for images

Make
sure
you provide accurate alt attribute text for any images that are on your
pages.

Navigability

Pages
within your site should be structured with a clear hierarchy. Several
alternative site-navigation mechanisms should be

supplied,
including at least one that is text-only.

Provide text links

Every
page
in your site should be accessible using a static text link.

Make a site map available to
your users

The
major
parts of your site should be easy to access using a site map

If
your
site map has more than about 100 links , you should divide the site map
into
separate pages.