The second thing to do is to Put your important text near top of page. Suppose you have put your company's logo (Acme Widgets) at top of page, as a gif or jpg image. Underneath it you might put some text reading: "California's first producer of Electronic Widgets". If California and Electronic Widgets are important keywords for you then you have started off your page very well. In fact, some search engines use first paragraph or phrase as description that is shown in search results. So if first paragraph or first phrase really says a lot and is attractive it may entice someone to visit your page. (Getting a top result in a search engine is one thing, but remember someone has to think that your page is interesting enough to visit if they are going to click on it, and description shown by search engine may be deciding factor determining whether they click through to your page or to your competitor's page)
But, what is top of page? It seems obvious but search engines do not see or rather, read pages in same way that our eye sees page. Recently I built a web site for someone and then looked at first search engine results for that site. I saw words "Choose your language" as description. (The search engine took a phrase from navigation bar on left hand side of page, where surfers were invited to choose which language version of site they wanted to see). This happened because search engines have to go through table structure of site. In order to align different elements (text and pictures) of a site, designers often divide page into tables. If a site is divided into two vertical tables, one for left hand navigation and one for body. The spider will first read everything in table on left before going to table on right. I corrected this problem by putting a pithy, keyword laden descriptive phrase in left hand column just above navigation elements. So, make sure that your important phrases are in places where spider will see them before they reach other less important phrases. If table structure on your page is not giving right picture to spider, then you should make necessary modifications to correct problem.
Donald Nelson is a web developer, editor and social worker. He has been promoting web sites since 1995 and now runs A1-Optimization (http://www.a1-optimization.com) a company that provides low-cost search engine optimization and submission services. He can be reached at support@a1-optimization.com
Optimizing Pages with JavaScript and Style Sheets for Search Engines
Written by Dale Goetsch
Continued from page 1
A new page is then created that holds code that was formerly held in SCRIPT tags. We will call it "codepage.js", and it looks like this.
function helloWorld(){ alert("Hello, World!"); return; }
Example 3—codepage.js includes only JavaScript code
This new file doesn't need any kind of HTML markup. It contains only code that was originally held between SCRIPT tags.
Style Sheet problem
In addition to JavaScript code, Style Sheet code can cause complications for Search Engines when it is put into a web page. For same reasons as JavaScript—moving important content further down page, and diluting keyword density—it is important to move Style Sheet code off of page as well.
Style Sheet solution
The thought behind removing Style Sheet information from a page is very similar to that of offloading JavaScript; syntax to do so is different.
The original page, "mypage.html", may look something like this.
My Title
...body of page...
Example 4—mypage.html with style sheet code
We want to move this code into a separate file, so we remove it from original page, and add a link to point to separate file that now holds Style Sheet code.
My Title
...body of page...
Example 5—mypage.html with Style Sheet code offloaded
Note addition of LINK tag. This contains three types of information that browser will need to reconstruct page when a visitor looks at it. The "rel='stylesheet'" attribute/value pair indicates that we are looking at a Style Sheet file here. The "href='style.css' rel='nofollow'" attribute/value pair points to external file that contains Style Sheet information. Typically these external files will be given filename extension ".css" to indicate that they contain Cascading Style Sheet code. You will replace filename "style.css" with name of actual file into which you place your stylesheet code. Finally, we have to specify MIME type of file, in "type='text/css'" attribute/value pair.
A new page is then created that holds code that was formerly held in STYLE tags. We will call it "style.css", and it looks like this.
body{ background:white; color:red; }
Example 6—style.css includes only Style Sheet code
This new file doesn't need any kind of HTML markup. It contains only code that was originally held between STYLE tags.
Conclusion
By following these two procedures, you have now made your web page more friendly to Search Engines. This means that next time your page is spidered by Search Engine robots, important content on your page will be closer to top of page, and you will have a better keyword density. This will result in your page appearing higher in Search Engine listings, and will probably bring more traffic to your website.
When you are ready to put your website to work for you, it's time to contact us.
Search Innovation Your Search is Over™ http://www.searchinnovation.com info@searchinnovation.com
Dale Goetsch is a Search Engine Marketing Consultant for Search Innovation, a Search Engine Marketing company serving small businesses. His background includes over twelve years as a software tester, as well as Perl, JavaScript and ASP programming.
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