|
Better Search Engine Placement |
|
|
Page 4 of 5
How Document Structure and Page Layout Affect Search Engine PlacementDocument structure and the style of page layout (frames, tables etc.) do affect your listing. In some cases ie: frames, it will limit the robots' ability to even index your site! If your using frames you should have the robot index the no frames version as some can't index frames or will just index the frameset which isn't much to index and will result in a low ranking. The use of tables to layout a document can and will in some cases change your placement because when you have a table for say a left border margin you force the meat of the document where most of your keywords will be found further down in the document lowering your ranking. Keep in mind that some engines bots only index part of your site ranging from 10-50%. A rule of thumb could be to put keywords in the left margin or in the top table of your document.
For document structure the easiest way to explain it is to give you a proper structure for an HTML document, so here it is:
<!--doc type--> important for validation
<html> this is an html document
<head> this is the start of the head element
<title>Place as many keywords as possible here, be sure they are the most relevant and most important</title>
<meta name="keywords" content="put up to but not more than 1024 characters here separated by comas see further comments">
<meta name="description" content="A description of the page or your business, try to use as many of the keywords as feasable">
</head> this is the end of the head element
<body> this is the start of the contents of the document or in simple terms everything before this is not in the "viewing" area of the browser.
<h1> This </h1>
<h2>is </h2> header
These are used like a title in the viewing area. These are used by some search engines to arrive
at ratings as
<h3>are</h3>
<h4> and</h4>,
<h5> and</h5>
<h6> and</h6>
which are a sort of sub title, using them for emphasis or font size is actually bad HTML!
</body> this is the end of the body element
</html> this is the end of this HTML document.
Document structure does seem to have some merit with the search engines and thinking logically from their point of view the reasons are probably twofold. Good structure results in documents that are easy to spot the meat in and secondly only good authors or those that really know what they're doing can produce them. This results in higher ratings for good documents because lets face it, the advent of all the HTML editors has resulted in a lot of less then acceptable pages.
Next we will look at some information to help you optimize your web pages for better search engine ranking.
|
|
Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 December 2004 )
|
Tutorials