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The Add Me! Newsletter *** SECOND EDITION ***
"Free Tips to promote your website"
Add Me, Inc http://www.addme.com
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October 24, 1998 Newsletter #2
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.....THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE.....
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - PAGE DETAILS
=========================================
There is a fine balance in creating pages that are
esthetically pleasing, informative, marketing conscious
and search engine friendly. And sometimes the goals are
at odds with each other.
TELL A STORY
============
Your web should tell a story, not unlike a newspaper
article, with a headline, content, images, captions, etc.
The components are all interconnected and all effect the
relevancy of your page or article.
COMPONENTS
==========
If you don't do anything else in terms of optimization,
do this: First, you must ask, what is the central and
primary theme to this page? That theme needs to be
repeated throughout the page in all of the components:
headline, content, Meta Tags, images, captions, etc.,
to get the best possible ranking. That is not to say
that the page must be LIMITED to one theme. But it
must EMPHASIZE at least one theme.
Let's say baseball is your theme. Your page can deal
with baseball and discuss hitting strategies, defensive
maneuvers, pitching statistics, etc.
But your page title should have the word baseball in it.
The ALT text tag for your images should mention baseball.
Your headline should have the word baseball in it. Your
Meta Tags need the word baseball and variations thereof
in the tags. And obviously you want to mention the word
baseball in your content.
Now how would you rank this page in terms of relevancy
for anyone doing a search on the word "baseball". Probably
pretty high. What about "pitching statistics". Not quite
as high, but it has some degree of relevancy.
Now buried in the Meta Tags of this baseball page, the
author decides to add the word "sex" just to get some
more hits. What do you think the probability of that page
getting hits on the word "sex" are? Somewhere between
zero and none.
Got another theme you want to emphasize? Make another
page.
ORDER
=====
Search engines start at the top and work their way to
the bottom (clever folks these programmers). And their
ranking mechanism will place MORE emphasis on content at
the beginning of the page than content at the bottom of
the page.
But that makes sense. When you read a newspaper article,
you tend to read the headline first. And then the first
paragraph. You expect it to tell you what the article is
all about. Same thing in search engines.
So make sure you place the most important information as
close to the top of your page as possible. And here is
the corollary: if it is NOT important DON'T put it at the
top of the page ... you are only pushing the good stuff
down.
So here is a good design strategy. Put five or six banners
at the top of your page, followed by 4 pictures of your
children, and 500 words about Clinton & Lewinsky, and
then devote the last 25 words on the page to discuss your
primary topic - wood carving.
Guaranteed you'll be number one in the search engines?
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PAGE LAYOUT
===========
Some page designs are more conducive to getting a better
placement than others. It is often the case that the
simplest presentation is the easiest to optimize.
- Plain Pages: content is presented top to bottom which
is exactly how the search engines will read it.
- Tables: search engines will look for content outside
tables first, then come back to read the tables. .
- Navigational Panels: if you use a table and insert
navigational content in the left-most column, that is
the information that will be read first as the search
engine reads from left to right.
- Shared borders: content in the top and left shared
borders are read before content in the main panel.
- Frames: in terms of optimization, frames actually work
well, because the navigational panel in the left is
actually a separate page and the content on the right is
also a separate page that has no navigational panel to
clutter it. However, there are other significant
limitations to frames that we won't get into here.
HEADLINES
=========
Headlines capture a reader's interest. They are also a
signal to the search engines that they represent an
IMPORTANT piece of information.
In order to highlight and emphasize that fact, use the
headline tag (H1 to H6) when formatting your headline.
Search engines will assign it more weight.
PAGE CONTENT
============
You need to have content on your pages. Pretty pages with
nice graphics and stunning banners may look very appealing,
but they are virtually meaningless to the search engines.
This is a critical point: The search engines do not have
our esthetic taste. They cannot "read" pictures. The search
engines need words on which to base their relevancy.
Here is a situation that, unfortunately, is all too often
found. The page has nothing on it except a beautiful,
artistic, animated rendition of your corporate logo.
Pretty? Absolutely. Search engine effective? Not at all.
And the client wants to know why the page isn't rated high
in the search engines?
I am not opposed to artistic creativity. And that might
very well be a part of the image that you want to project.
Just understand that this particular page has no substance
to earn a high ranking in the search engines.
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
=======================
As we said at the beginning, your web page tells a story.
Optimization is simply putting the components together so
that they emphasize at least one critical theme that you
want to get across.
Next time we'll look at some of the behind the scenes
material: Meta Tags.
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Article by Len Canning (candocdx@lemaze.com), founder of
LeMaze Resource Center(http://www.lemaze.com).
LeMaze lists in excess of 14,000 marketing and web development
resources. And for those who don't have the time or inclination
to do it themselves, they provide an array of marketing services.
Like a Free Meta Tag Analysis for your site, check out our Free
Meta Tag Analysis
(http://www.lemaze.com/Features/Submit_Forms/tag_analysis.htm)
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