July 21, 2008 by Admin
Websites are tools used to impart knowledge, perhaps of goods for sale or services available, to a worldwide market place. A plain page of text is not as likely to attract attention as graphics and logos – these are the equivalent of neon flashing signs in the physical world. The job of the Search Engine Optimisation team is to strike a balance between what works to bring the website up to the forefront in search results, whilst at the same time allowing the creative abilities of the webmaster and client to strut their stuff. Search Engine Optimization however, places great emphasis on the design of any web site.
Keywords are very important for telling the search engines what the expected content of a webpage is. Despite the fact that search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN use highly complicated algorithms to determine the ranking on a search results page, what the web crawlers copy into their databases is still basically HTML text and code. For Search Engine Optimisation, it is still important to incorporate keywords in a skilled and meaningful way. Graphics, photos and logos do not in general give any basic text that can be copied and indexed by the search engine robots. If you go to the Coca-Cola site, you are bombarded with graphics and there is very little basic text to be found on the main page, but then one would expect a vast majority of the population to know what Coca-Cola is. For a visitor to your own page however, more signposts, signals and indicators are needed to drive traffic to the site and so basic text is essential.
Bear in mind when building a website that at least the first 200kb of data should incorporate as much relevant description and keywords as possible. This is part of your Search Engine Optimisation solutions. Make sure that the first page at least has relevant text that truthfully explains the content of the website. The web crawler can index from 200kb up to 1020kb of data, depending on the search engine, so any text shown after that cut off point will arguably not make a scrap of difference to your ranking in the search results. If your key words are Tropical Paradise, make sure these are used at least twice at the beginning and end of the page, remembering that from a search engine crawler point of view, the end of the page is where it stops indexing.
When you focus on Search Engine Optimisation, once the keyword issues have been addressed, the images and tables can be inserted. Again for Search Engine Optimisation the inclusion of ALT tags for images is considered beneficial. ALT tag stands for Alternative Text tag and is used as a descriptive label for an image. Some computer users choose not to load graphics whilst browsing, particularly if the bandwidth connection is slow, and alternative text is a way for users to be made aware of the image they are missing. More importantly, Search Engine Optimisation, web crawlers consider this as standard basic text and it is therefore included in their content copying and indexing. For Search Engine Optimisation this is an important aspect to remember.
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