subject: Search Engine Optimization And Keywords Search Strategies [print this page] It's also good to avoid low-content pages from a usability perspective. A page with less than 200 words is unlikely to contain a large amount of searchable textual information, so site visitors will undoubtedly need to click elsewhere to find more detailed content. Search engines may prefer CSS-based sites and can score them higher in the search rankings. The benefits of clean code, flexibility of important content placement, and greater content density make it easier for search engines to access, assess, and rank CSS-based pages.
Headings are also incredibly useful for your human site visitors, as they aid scanning significantly. Generally speaking, we don't read on the Web: we scan, looking for the information we're after. If we, designers and developers, break up pages with sub-headings that effectively describe the content beneath them, we make scanning much easier for users. Descriptive links are also extremely important for usability. If Web users scan, rather than read, a litany of 'click here' links will be worthless to them. Descriptive links act like signposts to scanning users: as the person looks down the page, they understand immediately where the link 'about widgets' leads. This may seem like a strange characteristic of a search-optimised Website, but it's actually crucial. Search engines, in addition to page content, look at the number of links pointing into Web pages. Often, the more inbound links a Website has, all other things being equal, the higher in the search rankings it will appear.
It is generally agreed that the links that point to a website are one of the most powerful way of climbing Search Engines results pages (in fact many argue it is THE most important factor). To put it most simply every link to your site is seen by the search engines as being a vote of confidence in your site. Similarly many bloggers swap links with other bloggers. Sometimes this happens pretty naturally (you see someone linking to you so you link back) but in many cases the links are strategic ones and formally arranged between site owners. I get daily requests for such reciprocal links (I rarely act on them). Whilst there is some benefit in such link swapping I would again advise caution here as many SEO experts believe that the search engines have methods for tracking such strategies and devaluing the links. Some try to get around this by doing indirect or triangulated links. One of the growing theories of SEO is that you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. ie a niche topic blog will probably rank higher than a general one that covers many topics. Build a blog with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and youll increase your chances of ranking well as SEs will see you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to some kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog.
One way to do this for bloggers is to make sure that your category pages are in your sidebars as I do in this blog. Also make sure every page links back to your main page and any other important pages on your site. If youre writing on a topic youve previously written about consider linking to what youve written before or use a other relevant posts feature at the base of your article. Youll see in my menus at the top of the page a number of my key categories and articles.
