Today we will be quickly reviewing SEO - search engine optimization from the SEO guide.
Search engines have two major functions - 1. crawling and building an index 2. providing answers by calculating relevancy and serving results.
The web is connected by links between pages. Crawlers index these pages for fast lookups. Search engines have to provide answers in fractions of seconds because users lose focus after 2-3 seconds. Relevancy and importance from such voluminous data is determined in this time. SEO targets both these metrics. Relevance is a way of ranking what pertains to the user query. Importance is somewhat irrespective of the user query and focuses on the popularity of the site. There are several algorithms used to determine relevance and importance. Each Search engine may have their own.
Google recommends the following to get better ranking:
"Do" transactional queries such as to buy a plane ticket
"Know" informational queries such as to find the name of a restaurant
"Go" such as site specific queries such as LinkedIn
In spite of the efforts of the search engine, the users attention is not drawn to the results but to the words appearing in bold or titles or brief descriptions - things that are explicitly targeted in paid search listings.
To get your page noticed, you could:
wrap your images, plugins, video and audio content with text description of the content.
Search boxes can be supplemented with navigable and crawlable links and include a sitemap. Crawlable links means that the webpages are connected and the hrefs in the html point to say static links. If you want to hide content from the search engine, you could add rel="nofollow" for your hrefs or add meta robots tag or the robots.txt. When using keywords, use specific ones and don't stuff it on the content. keyword density does not help. Keywords in the titles help but don't make it longer than 65-75 characters. Always improve readability and emotional impact.
Search engines have millions of smaller databases that have keyword based indices. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data. Keywords thus play an important role in the search engine's ranking algorithm. Keywords appearing in title, text, image alt attributes and metadata promote a page's relevance. When keywords appear in the title, be mindful of the length, order and leverage branding.
Meta robot tags such as 'index/noindex' 'follow/nofollow' 'noarchive' 'nosnippet' 'noodp/noydir' restrict spider activity. They could be used judiciously. The meta description tag is what appears together with a search listing.
URLs could be made in a way such that they are shorter, use keywords, use hyphens to separate keywords and are static. Use canonicalization so that every unique piece of content has one and only one URL.
Search engines have two major functions - 1. crawling and building an index 2. providing answers by calculating relevancy and serving results.
The web is connected by links between pages. Crawlers index these pages for fast lookups. Search engines have to provide answers in fractions of seconds because users lose focus after 2-3 seconds. Relevancy and importance from such voluminous data is determined in this time. SEO targets both these metrics. Relevance is a way of ranking what pertains to the user query. Importance is somewhat irrespective of the user query and focuses on the popularity of the site. There are several algorithms used to determine relevance and importance. Each Search engine may have their own.
Google recommends the following to get better ranking:
- don't cloak your pages differently to search engines from what they appear to users
- organize your site with each page reachable by a static link
- pages are cohesive with respect to the content they provide
- use redirects and rel="canonical" for duplicate content.
- construct clean URLs with keywords
- provide keyword-rich content and refresh content
- don't hide the text to be indexed in resources
"Do" transactional queries such as to buy a plane ticket
"Know" informational queries such as to find the name of a restaurant
"Go" such as site specific queries such as LinkedIn
In spite of the efforts of the search engine, the users attention is not drawn to the results but to the words appearing in bold or titles or brief descriptions - things that are explicitly targeted in paid search listings.
To get your page noticed, you could:
wrap your images, plugins, video and audio content with text description of the content.
Search boxes can be supplemented with navigable and crawlable links and include a sitemap. Crawlable links means that the webpages are connected and the hrefs in the html point to say static links. If you want to hide content from the search engine, you could add rel="nofollow" for your hrefs or add meta robots tag or the robots.txt. When using keywords, use specific ones and don't stuff it on the content. keyword density does not help. Keywords in the titles help but don't make it longer than 65-75 characters. Always improve readability and emotional impact.
Search engines have millions of smaller databases that have keyword based indices. This makes it much faster for the engines to retrieve the data. Keywords thus play an important role in the search engine's ranking algorithm. Keywords appearing in title, text, image alt attributes and metadata promote a page's relevance. When keywords appear in the title, be mindful of the length, order and leverage branding.
Meta robot tags such as 'index/noindex' 'follow/nofollow' 'noarchive' 'nosnippet' 'noodp/noydir' restrict spider activity. They could be used judiciously. The meta description tag is what appears together with a search listing.
URLs could be made in a way such that they are shorter, use keywords, use hyphens to separate keywords and are static. Use canonicalization so that every unique piece of content has one and only one URL.
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