Accessibility
An accessible site is one that ensures delivery of its
content successfully as often as possible. The functionality of
pages, validity of HTML elements, uptime of the site's server,
and working status of site coding and components all figure into
site accessibility. If these features are ignored or faulty,
both search engines and users will select other sites to visit.
The biggest problems in accessibility that most sites
encounter fit into the following categories. Addressing these
issues satisfactorily will avoid problems getting search engines
and visitors to and through your site.
- Broken Links - If an HTML link is
broken, the contents of the linked-to page may never be
found. In addition, some surmise that search engines
negatively degrade rankings on sites & pages with many
broken links.
- Valid HTML & CSS - Although arguments
exist about the necessity for full validation of HTML and
CSS in accordance with
W3C guidelines, it is generally agreed that code must
meet minimum requirements of functionality and successful
display in order to be spidered and cached properly by the
search engines.
- Functionality of Forms and Applications
- If form submissions, select boxes, javascript, or other
input-required elements block content from being reached via
direct hyperlinks, search engines may never find them. Keep
data that you want accessible to search engines on pages
that can be directly accessed via a link. In a similar vein,
the successful functionality and implementation of any of
these pieces is critical to a site's accessibility for
visitors. A non-functioning page, form, or code element is
unlikely to receive much attention from visitors.
- File Size - With the exception of a
select few documents that search engines consider to be of
exceptional importance, web pages greater than 150K in size
are typically not fully cached. This is done to reduce index
size, bandwidth, and load on the servers, and is important
to anyone building pages with exceptionally large amounts of
content. If it's important that every word and phrase be
spidered and indexed, keeping file size under 150K is highly
recommended. As with any online endeavor, smaller file size
also means faster download speed for users - a worthy metric
in its own right.
- Downtime & Server Speed - The
performance of your site's server may have an adverse impact
on search rankings and visitors if downtime and slow
transfer speeds are common. Invest in high quality hosting
to prevent this issue.
URLs, Title Tags & Meta Data
URLs, title tags and meta tag components are all information
that describe your site and page to visitors and search engines.
Keeping them relevant, compelling and accurate are key to
ranking well. You can also use these areas as launching points
for your keywords, and indeed, successful rankings require their
use.
The URL of a document should ideally be as descriptive and
brief as possible. If, for example, your site's structure has
several levels of files and navigation, the URL should reflect
this with folders and subfolders. Individual pages' URLs should
also be descriptive without being overly lengthy, so that a
visitor who sees only the URL could have a good idea of what to
expect on the page. Several examples follow:
Comparison of URLs for a Canon Powershot SD400
Camera
Amazon.com - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007TJ5OG/102-8372974-
4064145?v=glance&n=502394&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&n=3031001&s=photo&v=glance
Canon.com - http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/controller?
act=ModelDetailAct&fcategoryid=145&modelid=11158
DPReview.com - http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/
With both Canon and Amazon, a user has virtually no idea
what the URL might point to. With DPReview's logical URL,
however, it is easy to surmise that a review of a Canon
SD400 is the likely topic of the page.
In addition to the issues of brevity and clarity, it's also
important to keep URLs limited to as few dynamic parameters as
possible. A dynamic parameter is a part of the URL that provides
data to a database so the proper records can be retrieved, i.e.
n=3031001, v=glance, categoryid=145, etc.
Note that in both Amazon and Canon's URLs, the dynamic
parameters number 3 or more. In an ideal site, there should
never be more than two. Search engineer representatives have
confirmed on numerous occasions that URLs with more than 2
dynamic parameters may not be spidered unless they are perceived
as significantly important (i.e. have many, many links pointing
to them).
Well written URLs have the additional benefit of serving as
their own anchor text when copied and pasted as links in forums,
blogs, or other online venues. In the DPReview example, a search
engine might see the URL http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canonsd400/
and give ranking credit to the page for terms in the URL like
dpreview, reviews, canon, sd, 400. The parsing and breaking of
terms is subject to the search engine's analysis, but the chance
of earning this additional credit makes writing friendly, usable
URLs even more worthwhile.
Title tags, in addition to their invaluable use in targeting
keyword terms for rankings, also help drive click-through-rates
(CTRs) from the results pages. Most of the search engines will
use a page's title tag as the blue link text and headline for a
result (see image below), and thus it is important to make them
informative and compelling without being overly "salesy". The
best title tags will make the targeted keywords prominent, help
brand the site, and be as clear and concise as possible.
Examples and Recommendations for Title Tags
Page on Red Pandas from the
Wellington Zoo:
- Current Title: Red Panda
- Recommended: Red Panda - Habitat, Features, Behavior |
Wellington Zoo
Page on Alexander Calder from
the Calder Foundation:
- Current Title: Alexander Calder
- Recommended: Alexander Calder - Biography of the Artist
from the Calder Foundation
Page on Plasma TVs from
Tiger Direct:
- Current Title: Plasma Televisions, Plasma TV, Plasma
Screen TVs, SONY Plasma TV, LCD TV at TigerDirect.com
- Recommended: Plasma Screen & LCD Televisions at
TigerDirect.com
For each of these, the idea behind the recommendations is to
distill the information into the clearest, most useful snippet
while retaining the primary keyword phrase as the first words in
the tag. The title tag provides the first impression of a web
page and can either serve to draw the visitor in or compel him
or her to choose another listing in the results.
Meta Tag Recommendations:
 Meta
tags once held the distinction of being the primary realm of SEO
specialists. Today, the use of meta tags, particularly the meta
keywords tag, has diminished to an extent that search engines no
longer use them in their ranking of pages. However, the meta
description tag can still be of some importance, as several
search engines use this tag to display the snippet of text below
the clickable title link in the results pages.
In the image to the left, an illustration of a Google SERP
(Search Engine Results Page) shows the use of the meta
description and title tags. It is on this page that searchers
generally make their decision as to which result to click, and
thus, while the meta description tag may have little to no
impact on where a page ranks, it can significantly impact the #
of visitors the page receives from search engine traffic. Note
that meta tags are NOT always used on the SERPs, but can be seen
(at the discretion of the search engine) if the description is
accurate, well-written, and relevant to the searcher's query.
Search-Friendly Text
Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't
complicated, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with.
Text styles that cannot be indexed by search engines include:
- Text embedded in a Java Application or Macromedia Flash
file
- Text in an image file - jpg, gif, png, etc
- Text accessible only via a form submit or other on-page
action
If the search engines can't see your page's text, they cannot
spider and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making
search-friendly text in HTML format is critical to ranking well
and getting properly indexed. If you are forced to use a format
that hides text from search engines, try to use the right
keywords and phrases in headlines, title tags, URLs, and
image/file names on the page. Don't go overboard with this
tactic, and never try to hide text (by making it the same color
as the background or using CSS tricks). Even if the search
engines can't detect this automatically, a competitor can easily
report your site for spamming and have you de-listed entirely.
Along with making text visible, it's important to remember
that search engines measure the terms and phrases in a document
to extract a great deal of information about the page. Writing
well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEOs
are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search
engines score text for rankings), and one that can be harnessed
to achieve better rankings.
In general, the following are basic rules that apply to
optimizing on-page text for search rankings:
- Make the primary term/phrase prominent in the
document - Measurements like keyword density are
useless (see
kw density myth thread), but general frequency can help
rankings.
- Make the text on-topic and high quality
- Search engines use sophisticated lexical analysis to help
find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers
identifying common elements in high quality writing. Thus,
great writing can provide benefits to rankings, as well as
visitors.
- Use an optimized document structure -
The best practice is generally to follow a journalistic
format wherein the document starts with a description of the
content, then flows from broad discussion of the subject to
narrow. The benefits of this are arguable, but in addition
to SEO value, they provide the most readable and engaging
informational document. Obviously, in situations where this
would be inappropriate, it's not necessary.
- Keep text together - Many folks in SEO
recommend using CSS rather than table layouts in order to
keep the text flow of the document together and prevent the
breaking up of text via coding. This can also be achieved
with tables - simply make sure that text sections (content,
ads, navigation, etc.) flow together inside a single table
or row and don't have too many "nested" tables that make for
broken sentences and paragraphs.
Keep in mind that the text layout and keyword usage in a
document no longer carries high importance in search engine
rankings. While the right structure and usage can provide a
slight boost, obsessing over keyword placement or layout will
provide little overall benefit.
Information Architecture
The document and link structure of a website can provide
benefits to search rankings when performed properly. The keys to
effective architecture are to follow the rules that govern human
usability of a site:
- Make Use of a Sitemap - It's wise to
have the sitemap page linked to from every other page in the
site, or at the least from important high-level category
pages and the home page. The sitemap should, ideally, offer
links to all of the site's internal pages. However, if more
than 100-150 pages exist on the site, a wiser system is to
create a sitemap that will link to all of the category level
pages, so that no page in a site is more than 2 clicks from
the home page. For exceptionally large sites, this rule can
be expanded to 3 clicks from the home page.
- Use a Category Structure that Flows from Broad >
Narrow - Start with the broadest topics as
hierarchical category pages, then expand to deep pages with
specific topics. Using the most on-topic structure tells
search engines that your site is highly relevant and covers
a topic in-depth.
For more information on segmenting document structure and
link hierarchies, see Dr. Garcia's excellent
guide to on-topic analysis.
Canonical Issues & Duplicate Content
One of the most common and problematic issues for website
builders, particularly those with larger, dynamic sites powered
by databases, is the issue of duplicate content. Search engines
are primarily interested in unique documents and text, and when
they find multiple instances of the same content, they are
likely to select a single one as "canonical" and display that
page in their results.
If your site has multiple pages with the same content, either
through a content management system that creates duplicates
through separate navigation, or because copies exist from
multiple versions, you may be hurting those pages' chances of
ranking in the SERPs. In addition, the value that comes from
anchor text and link weight, through both internal and external
links to the page, will be diluted by multiple versions.
The solution is to take any current duplicate pages and use a
301 re-direct (described
in detail here) to point all versions to a single,
"canonical" edition of the content.
One very common place to look for this error is on a site's
homepage - oftentimes, a website will have the same content on
http://www.url.com, http://url.com, and http://www.url.com/index.html.
That separation alone can cause lost link value and severely
damage rankings for the site's homepage. If you find many links
outside the site pointing to both the non-www and the www
version, it may be wise to use a 301 re-write rule to affect all
pages at one so they point to the other
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