Chapter 5 - Optimizing Your Web Pages
Now that you know how to structure your site and pages, you next need to optimize those pages for Google. As such, this chapter is quite important- in fact, this is the meat of the matter where many search engine optimizers (SEOs) tend spend the majority of their time on.
Put another way, this chapter discusses those aspects and elements of web pages that determine relevancy in Google.
Specifically, Google checks if and how keywords that match a search query are used on pages on your website AND on pages on offterwebsites that link to your site.
Tip: Not just HTML pages need to be optimized. If your Web site contains PDF or Word files, these too must be optimized. Google will index all files on your Web server that it can find, and these will be included in the overall site ranking algorithm.
Keyword Factors Used in the Algorithm
The following factors play a part in the portion of the Google algorithm that determines page relevancy. Google looks at the following keyword factors and assigns a relevancy score for each page of your site. The factors are listed in approximate order of importance, however, like all factors in the Google algorithm, this is subject to change.
Keyword Proximity
Google looks at individual words that make up phrases. Keyword proximity is a measure of word order and closeness. The closer all words in a keyword phrase are together, and in the correct order, the better.
Obviously, exact matches score the best. As an example, say someone does a search on “country house plans”. Google will assign a higher score if your page contains “country house plans” than if it contains “country and farm house plans”. For the latter, all three words are contained on the page, so the page would receive some score, but since this is an inexact match (there are words in between “country and “house”), the page score would be lower than for the exact match of country house plans.
Keyword Placement
This measures where on the page keywords are located. Google looks for keywords in the page title, in headings, in body text, in links, in image ALT text, in drop-down boxes, in file names, and in domain names.
Keyword Prominence
A measure of how early or high up on a page the keywords are found. Having keywords in the first heading and in the first paragraph (first 20 words or so) on a page are best.
Keyword Density
Also known as keyword weight, the number of times a keyword is used on a page divided by the total number of words on the page. There is some confusion over keyword density. Part of this stems from the fact that different software programs look at different parts of the page and calculate this differently.
There doesn’t seem to be an ideal density value for Google - from 6 - 20% is good. Just don’t spam. In other words, don’t fill your pages up needlessly with your keywords - not only will customers think your site is amateurish, but Google may penalize you. It is not clear however whether Google measures keyword density per page, across the entire site - or both, in their ranking algorithm.
Keyword density used to be more important in the past for search engines, and you may still find books and other literature that stress the importance of this factor. For Google (at least currently), it is not that important. This can change however.
A good online tool for calculating keyword density for a web page is located at http://www.keyworddensity.com/
Keyword Format
A measure of whether keywords are bolded or italicized on the page. The best place to do this is in the first paragraph of the page. This isn’t a real important factor, but every little bit helps.
The Importance of the <TITLE>
There is one place on a web page where your keywords MUST be present, and that is in the page title, which is everything between the <TITLE> tags in the <HEAD> section of a page. The page title (not to be confused with the heading for a page) is what is displayed in the title bar of your browser window, and is also what is displayed when you bookmark a page or add it to your browser Favorites.
Correct use of keywords in the title of every page of your website is extremely important to Google - particularly for the home page. If you do nothing else to optimize your site, remember to do this! Also note that the “Keywords” META tag is ignored by Google. Concentrate your efforts on the title for each page, making sure they contain the best keywords for the content of each page.
The title shouldn’t consist of much more than about 9 words or 60 characters, with your keywords used at the very beginning of the title. Since Google is looking for relevant keywords in the title, this means you should NOT include your company name in the title unless your company name is so well known as to be a keyword in it’s own right with instant name recognition - like Disney, Nike, or Yahoo. If you must include your company name in the title, put it at the end. In addition, each page title should be unique - don’t duplicate titles on pages.
If you remember only one sentence in this entire book-commit this one to memory:
Improper or nonexistent use of titles in web pages will keep more websites out of top rankings on Google than any other factor except perhaps for a lack of relevant content on a page or a lack of quality links from other websites that point to your site.
The following table shows both the improper and proper use of titles on an example website that sells house plans. You undoubtedly have seen numerous websites that use “Home” as the title of their home page. Google may think these sites are about homes!
As you can see, you should use relevant keywords in every title of every page of your site.
Best Practices for Creating Titles
Here are some best practices you should follow for creating titles on pages:
• Each page should have a unique title.
• If practical, try to include your Primary Keyword Phrase in every title of every page
• Begin the title of your home page with your Primary Keyword Phrase, followed by your best Secondary Keyword Phrases
• Use more specific variations to your Primary Keyword Phrase on your specific product, service, or content pages
• If you must include your company name, put it at the end of the title
• Use the best form, plural or singular, for your keywords based on what WordTracker says is searched on more often
• Don’t overdo it - don’t repeat your keywords more than 2-3 times in the title
• Make sure the <TITLE> tag is the first element in the <HEAD> section of your page - this makes it easier to find by Google.
How and Where to Use Keywords
Don’t try to use all of your keywords on the home page - rather focus only on your Primary Keyword Phrase and your best Secondary Keyword. Use your product or service pages to focus on the more specific keyword phrases as determined using WordTracker.
In general, you will likely want to use the plural form of your keywords. However, you need to verify this using WordTracker as sometimes the singular form of a word is searched on more often.
Google as of the November 2003 “Florida” update now incorporates word stemming into their search results. See the following section for a discussion on word stemming.
Google treats hyphenated words as two words: house-plans is the same as house plans on Google. However, words connected by an underscore, such as house_plans are treated as a single word currently.
In addition, Google is not case-sensitive, so HOUSE PLANS, House Plans, house plans, and HoUsE pLaNs are all treated the same.
Use Keywords in the Following Places
The following shows where keywords should be used on your web pages. The list is in approximate order of importance (subject to change). The first four items are particularly important, with Google giving weight to keywords found in the title much more than any of the other locations.
1. Title: <TITLE>Aeywords</TITLE>. Use starting with first or second word in the title.
2. Headings: <H1 >Aeywords</H1>, <H2>Aeywords</H2>. Use a stylesheet (CSS file) to control the size of heading text to make it blend in better.
3. First paragraph of page (first 20 words): <BODY><P>*eywords</P> Bold and/or italicize keywords also.
4. Link (anchor) text: <A HREF>/ceywords</A>. The clickable portion of links.
5. Last paragraph of page: <P>*eywords </P></BODY>
6. Drop-down boxes: <FORM><OPTlON>*eywords</OPTlON></FORM>
7. URLs: <A href=”http://www.Aeywords.com/”></A>
8. Folder & file names: keywords/keywords.html, Aeywords.gif
9. Image ALT text: <IMG src=”" ALT=”Aeywords” >
10. Link TITLE attribute text: <A href=”" TITLE=”keywords”></A> (Displays in Internet Explorer only)
Note: There has been a trend where more people are abusing H1 taps by wrapping them around entire pages of content or by using multiple H1 tags on a page.
This is a bad idea and borders on spam -the H1 tag should be used a page headline, nothing else. It is perfectly legitimate to reduce the size of H1 text on a page using a linked style sheet but that’s about it There is some evidence to suggest that Google maybe discounting H1 text as a result so it may carry less weight for ranking moving forward.
The same can be said about image ALT text - some people are putting entire paragraphs of content in them for each image on a page. It is perfectly legitimate to put keywords relating to the image or to the section of the page that the image appears but that’s it. There is evidence to suggest that image ALT text does now carry less weight than before. Images that are clickable (wrapped in a A HREF tag) do not appear to have a discounting of ALT text however.
About Word Stemming
As of November 2003, Google now uses word stemming. Word stemming allows all forms of the word - singular, plural, verb form as well as similar words to be returned for a given search query. This can work both for and against a site depending on which form of a word a page is primarily optimized for. So if someone types in “house plans”, not only will pages that are optimized for that phrase be returned, but so will pages that contain all variations of that phrase, for example:
Conversely, a page that may be optimized for “house plans” will also be returned whenever a searcher types in any variation of that phrase. Using the same example, typing in any of the phrases below would also return the page optimized for “house plans”:
house plan house planning house plannerWord stemming is in general a helpful feature for searchers to have, since it saves one from having to think of many variations of a word. Word stemming can help as well as hurt your ranking for a given page as not only does it increases the number of words that you can rank well for (even if you do not include a given form of the word anywhere on a page) but it can also increase the amount of sites (competition) returned for a given search query.
Stemming can be overridden. When you enter a search query in google, place a plus “+” sign in front of the word for which you want to disable stemming for. For example:
house +plans
Would disable stemming on “plans” and thus not return pages that contain variations on that word.
Pay attention to stemming for your keywords - particularly to what the root word is and what Google considers to be a match for that word when optimizing pages over time.
Proper Link Structure
Besides the title of a page, Google places special importance on the use of keywords in the text of links. This means you need to structure your links correctly.
Ideally, you should only use text links on your site as opposed to graphics (like buttons) links. Google looks for, and counts, keywords contained in link anchor text-the clickable portion of the link. Remember that Google cannot see graphics-based links - all it has to go on is the ALT attribute for image tags, which doesn’t carry near as much weight. In fact, recent evidence indicates that Google may not continue to read ALT text in image tags due to their misuse.
If there is a second sentence to remember in this book, it is as follows:
Keywords found in link text should match keywords found on the page that the link points to - especially in the title of the page.
Here is an example of the ideal link structure for Google. Of primary importance is the use of keywords in link anchor text (text between the <A HREF> </A> tags). Note also the use of keywords in the actual name of the graphics file. Every little bit helps!
Text-Based (Ideal) Link Structure:
<A href=”your-keywords .html” TITLE=”your keywords” > у our keywords</A>
If you must use graphics-based links on your web pages, be sure and fill in the ALT text attribute of the image tag as follows:
Graphics Link Structure:
<A href=”уour-keywords.html”>
<IMG src=”your-keywords.gif” AlT=”your keywords” BORDER=”0″></A>
What Google Ignores
Google ignores the following elements on your web pages. Due to their abuse and misuse, META tags are a thing of the past with Google!
• Information in the <META name= “Keywords”> tag
• Information in the <META name = “Description”> tag
Note: Google has been known to display information from the META “Description” tag in their search listings if it cannot find a description for your page in the OPD (DMOZ) directory. Because of this, and because other search engines do read it, you should use this tag and have a decent-sounding description that includes your keywords. Make sure each description is unique per page.
- Information within the <!—Comments –> tag
- Information within the <STYLE>
- Information within <SCRIPT> tags (JavaScript and other client-side code)
- Duplicate links to the same page (only counts once)
- Links that point to the same page they are on
- Any graphics or multimedia (menu buttons, photos, animations, Flash)
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