Search Engine Listings

This is an article that is not set in stone! We intend to return and update it as we consider the matter more, and one way you can help is by providing feedback of any experiences with the Search Engine Optimisation Services that are offering their services.

We have in our resources section began to discuss the many issues of search engine optimisation, and we think it is fair to say that they are involved enough to merit the attention of a professional service. We currently use no such service and we are not offering our services either as we consider ourselves on the learning curve in respect to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Consider the following aspects of optimisation:

• domain names
• meta keywords
• meta description
• keyword placement in content
• page titles
• spider optimisation
• link exchanges and external linking
• search engine submission
• pay per click advertising
• alt text and the link title tag
• site spell checking

Having an experienced professional with access to all the tools of their trade check over your site may well be a very sound investment.

Conversely though paying some charlatan big money to "drive traffic to your site" may be a major disaster and there are several horror stories of scams that have involved automated visits to sites to make it appear real traffic was being directed to a site.

You also need to be very sure that your site will not be poisoned by illegitimate  techniques such as hidden text and links. May sure you never relinquish control over your site content and examine any advice you are given with reference to the google search engine optimisation page. If google don't like it, don't do it.

One of the first things you will come across when looking at ways to get your web site noticed, is the link exchange program. Sites that offer you reciprocating links and promise "swarms" of visitors or similarly hyped inducements to sign up. Some of these programs bear all the hallmarks of pyramid scams, but with "number of visitors to your site" replacing the "wads of cash to your door". 

It is unquestionably important that to get your pages ranked highly by search engines, then you must have other web sites linking to your site and to different pages on your site.

A link to a page on your site is a vote of confidence and quaility. But they must be the right type of link. If you read the google guidelines they warn explicitly:

"Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links"

We would advise taking this advice to heart.  Is it worth engaging in a promotion that might not only cost you money to participate, but may also actually backfire?

A major factor with search engines is the number of pages that they find on your site.

This raises intriguing questions as to:

•  How do they find out?
•  How to they get it right?

The way they find out is at the basis level simple enough. They start at a page of your site that they already know about. Probably via a link from another site, and they index that page, examine the links on that page and visit those pages, repeating the process until the site is fully indexed. This is known as "spidering".

But this simplistic explanation falls over very rapidly. If the web was made up of static pages written in plain html it would work, but just look at the page you are on now! In common with almost all of our pages, it is prefixed index.php and a set of parameters decide which content to show, and what is more that content is dynamically generated from a database!

Thus we could easily create a page:

randomquotes.php?lasthash=1

This page would display a random few quotes from a quote database and have a link to the page:

randomquotes.php?lasthash=2

and so on ad-infinitum.

How does a search engine deal with this situation? Will it spider your pages for ever believing you to have an infinite number of differerent pages? Well clearly not!

One way a search engine will judge, is by looking at the meta tags and page titles. If these are identical it will be able to limit the number of pages it visits.

But I hear you say, I could easily make these dynamic as well! that would screw up the search indexing system. The spider might stop eventually, but it will think I have a massive site and this will improve my search engine rankings!

Well maybe?, maybe not? Search Engines employ a lot of smart techniques that they are certainly not going to disclose for the very reason that people in the SEO Search Engine Optimisation business will be quick to find ways to work around.

It is also worth considering that they may flag suspect sites for human intervention and they may fry your sites butt for attempting to spoof them.

That's the bad news, the good news is that there are legitimate techniques that you should be considering, techniques that help your pages show up for accurate indexing.

Consider your page design and navigation. If you are using Mambo as your content managment system (similar rules are likely to apply to other portal systems) then you have two basic choices when displaying content.

• Blog style, a series of articles appears on an individual page for easy perusal by the casual viewer.
• An indexed style where article titles appear and you have to click on each article to see the article in its own individual page.

For short articles the Blog style is far more user friendly in showing off dynamic web content. Each time the user revisits a page, the page (assuming you are writing new content) will have clearly changed and they can start reading from the top. In the indexed style there is a static header and a list the user must look at and decide if the headlines are new and worth looking at.

In essences for humans you often want Blogs, but for search engines the situation is reversed. A Blogged page will lack the clear titles and reference tags that help define the page for the search engine.

The answer to this dilemma is really blindingly obvious and at least in Mambo very easy. You make the main navigation into a page a "blog" style, but you also provide a link to the same content in the indexed style.

Where once you had a single page with 6 articles, none of which might index well with the search engines, you now have seven pages, with six of those pages capable of having very accurate title and meta tags.

Search engines are only automated parsers, they have uncounted millions of web sites to parse and they must try and do this with at least some limits on bandwidth and even processing power!

This means that they are not impossible to try and con with hidden keywords, in order to attempt to get a better placement for your pages.

One of the ways to do this, is to have text on your web page that the search engine will see and rank, but which will be invisible to the user. You can do this with a cascading style sheet, which is external to the page and hence will almost certainly not be spotted by the automated parsing of current search engines.

We do not do this and I am not going to include instructions here for this or the myriad other ways I can think of for hiding text.

If you do go down this road, consider these points.

1. Once apon a time search engines didn't spot "white on white" text either, now your site can be penalised for it.
2. Sites that "spam" search engines may be penalised by manual intervention. By getting to the top of the pile they become very visible to manual spotting.
3. People may complain directly to search engines about spamming sites.
4. Do you want to have to worry about whether you are in fact setting up your site to be banned?   

Next time you search perhap as we would like to think using our Foboz - Meta Search Engine take a look at the page source, and look for spam, text that you never see in the browser window, but is laden with keywords for the search engines.

It is easy when writing web pages to sometimes forget that in order to read those pages, people have to somehow actually find them!

Part of that battle is visible on your site. You need good navigation and headlines within a site to help your returning viewers see new content.

The other part of that battle is with search engines, you want to see your content displayed highly in search engine results. <title> and <meta description> tags are an important part of this process.

Consider the point of view of a search engine and of someone looking at search engine results. If you do not have a relevant <title> and <meta description> then even if a search engine has flagged that a page contains text relevent to the user, what part of that text will be displayed as a summary?  Clearly without a helping hand from the <meta description> the summary could be rather random and disappointing.

The <title> tag is of even more importance. Many search engines ignore <meta keywords>, as they are never displayed to the user, they are an open invitation for webmasters to try and spam search engines with keywords for content that does not really exist.

However the <title> tag is a different matter. it is displayed on the users web browser and hence is a more reliable source of information about the real contents of a page.

For example one of our pages has:

<title>MarsJupiter - Family Shareware Meta content keywords
 
</title>
<meta name="description" content="MarsJupiter family shareware ,
Use of meta content, 
tag keywords with reference to good keywords freeware software"
 />

Note that if you use Mambo Open Portal you should read this article for information on changing <title> tags.