Further Marketing with Search Engine Optimization

In the last post we looked at the basic mechanics of how search engines work, why its important and how content can be made readable to crawlers and enhance search rankings.  In this post we'll look at creating friendly web page design for crawlers, how to maximize on keyword search.  This content comes from the same article.

While plain text remains the best way for crawlers to index content, there are alternatives while using more complicated mediums such as flash or interactive images to insure that crawlers can follow your content.  Using "alt" text on images, or descriptive text below the image ensure that content is read by the search engine.  Providing transcripts is another way to make audio or video content readable to crawlers.  Further, using the "Cache" feature in google searches you can see exactly what the crawlers see!

Another way to ensure crawlers find all the content on a page is to have all of your pages properly linked through the homepage.  Pages that are important to a sites content, but that remain hidden behind other pages and content may be left abandoned by the crawlers.  Additionally, including anchor text when coding link creation means that the link can be read as content by the crawlers as well.  Pages are also blocked from crawlers due to a variety of circumstances.  This includes content blocked by any type of form submissions, including search forms or boxes, links in javascript, java, flash, plugins, frames, or I-frames, and lastly, pages with hundreds of other links on them.  Keeping these concerns in mind when doing page design will help index your page and boost your rankings.


Using keywords throughout a page is also important in achieving a higher ranking with search engines.  By displaying commonly searched words in titles and in multiple places throughout the page the better the chance of getting onto that first page.  Though at one point keyword abuse was a successful way to receive a high page rank, by stuffing key words into link tags, content, alt text, ect. modern spiders have become intelligent enough to avoid those traps, and now those tactics end up doing more harm than good.

Optimizing key words on a page further helps with its rankings.  By publishing keywords at the beginning of a title, near the top of the page, and 2-3 times on the page in various forms helps cover variations that might be searched later on; however, reposting the same keyword throughout a page does not correlate with higher rankings.  And though meta tags do not boost SEO rankings, their use is recommended to draw traffic to your site, code is easily accessible by searching online.  

Understanding which keywords are important to emphasize requires a lot of tracking and research on the traffic a page is getting.  By knowing what keywords are leading to people clicking on a page and then getting further engagement or profit can lead to further refinement of keyword structuring or importance.  This process requires much hypothesizing and repeating before optimization of keywords can be determined for a particular page.

This article can be accessed here.