Search Friendly Text

Search Friendly Text

Making the visible text on a page "search-friendly" isn't perplexed, but it is an issue that many sites struggle with. Text styles that won’t 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 approachable only via a form submit or other on-page action

If the search engines can't view your page's text, they cannot crawl and index that content for visitors to find. Thus, making search-friendly text in HTML format is decisive to ranking well and getting properly indexed. If you are pushed to use a format that conceals 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 rival can easily report your site for spamming and have you de-listed totally.

Along with making text visible, it's important to recall that search engines evaluate the terms and phrases in a document to extract a great deal of information about the page. Composing well for search engines is both an art and a science (as SEO are not privy to the exact, technical methodology of how search engines score text for rankings), and one that can be tackled to achieve better rankings.

In general, the following are basic rules that enforce to optimizing on-page text for search rankings:

• Make the main term/phrase outstanding in the document - Measurements like keyword density are useless (see kw density myth thread), but universal frequency can help rankings.

• Make the text on-topic and high quality - Search engines use advanced lexical analysis to help find quality pages, as well as teams of researchers placing common elements in high quality writing. Thus, great writing can supply gains to rankings, as well as visitors.

• Use an optimized document structure - The best practice is mostly 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 gains of this are moot, but in increase to SEO value, they render the most readable and pursuing informational document. Evidently, in positions where this would be unfitting, it's not essential.

• 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 prevention 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.

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 import, 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.

Meta Tag Variations

The placement of the keywords is also important. Including many of a web page's most-important keyword phrases in the page's META tag is one common tactic. A META tag is a piece of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code that describes the content of a web page. In our example, then, the HTML code for the Arizona real estate company might look, in part, something like this:Arizona real estate, real estate in Arizona, Arizona META>.Realtors

Another common practice is including a good, strategic description of the page in the TITLE tag, which is the piece of HTML code that displays the title of a web page at the top of a web browser's interface. Many websites also incorporate keywords at the beginning and ending of their marketing and sales copy as well as at the beginning and end of individual sentences.

Registering an e-commerce website with a search engine is another important aspect of getting products and services before potential customers. Registering a website is usually free or at least inexpensive. Google, for example, lets you register any web page at http://www.google.com/addurl.html, although they make no guarantees when or if the link will be added to its database. A similar free service is provided by Yahoo! http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest. MSN offers a range of submission services for a fee (http://www.submit-it.com).

If you want to ensure you have a high search-engine ranking on a particular search engine, you can pay for a piece of this prime search engine real estate. Google, again, is the leader in this type of search engine advertisement with its text-only “Sponsored Links” displayed alongside the free listings. Other major websites offer similar advertising services.