Real World Computing
Optimise and prosper
The most important meta tag is the "description" tag, the only one Google takes any notice of and which gets used as the text that appears within the search results. If a page has no description tag, Google will choose some text from the page itself, with unpredictable results. Come up with a pithy, sales-orientated message to bring visitors to your site.
Step 7: mark-up
It's important to use standard tags for marking up text within your HTML documents. For example, it's best to redefine the heading tags in a stylesheet and use
, and to mark up your headings. It's common sense that your headings will tend to include the page's keywords, but Google is probably wise to people who redefine as a body style, so don't try it!
to mark up your headings. It's common sense that your headings will tend to include the page's keywords, but Google is probably wise to people who redefine as a body style, so don't try it!
Step 8: site map
While not essential, a site map will help Google index your site more effectively. It's important enough for Google to mention it in its webmasters' tools. Search for "webmaster tools" and it will be at number 1 - surprise, surprise.
You should have a site map in any case for visitors, but for Google's benefit you should also create a file called sitemap.xml and place it in your web root folder. This is a simple XML file that indicates to Google's spider which pages you'd like it to index. Personally, I'm not sure what this achieves because the spider will follow all your links in any case, but Google specifically mentions it and it's simple to implement.
Step 9: robots.txt
robots.txt is a text file that was once used to tell a visiting spider how often the site should be indexed. Nowadays, search engines decide for themselves how often they'll index your site, and this will depend on its popularity and relevance rather than what might appear in robots.txt .
Today, robots.txt is mainly used to exclude certain folders from the indexing process. You might want to exclude members' areas or admin folders and, in this way, take control over exactly which pages are displayed following searches. In my case, I discovered that one of our most popular keyword combinations was returning a page from an old version of Passyourtheory that I'd forgotten to delete.
Step 10: PageRank and links
Steps 1 to 9 are in roughly descending order of importance. Step 10, however, is absolutely essential, especially in a competitive market. PageRank (named after Larry Page) is a number generated according to a secret algorithm, but the principle is simple - when Google decides where to rank a page, it looks for relevance, and it will analyse not only the relevance of the content on your page, but also the content of pages that link to yours. So to improve your ranking, look for sites with a higher page ranking to link to yours. Google will see that a site it regards as an authority is in effect recommending you, and you're ranking will improve. Links into your site from lower ranking sites don't harm your position, but neither do they help.
When it comes to SEO, links out of your site don't improve your ranking at all, and it's possible in this case for them to damage it by linking to low-quality content. That said, remember the point of your site is to be useful to human visitors, so a good "links" page might well be worthwhile anyway. In that case, I'd recommend using JavaScript to assemble these links only when they're clicked, rendering them invisible to Google and other search engines and therefore not damaging your position.
