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For a more effective site
Some companies try to attract website owners by offering them top rankings on thousands of web search engines. This is just a marketing gimmick, claimed an expert recently.
Speaking at a two-day workshop on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Ausaf Ali Khan of the Chillizone Limited, said: “Do not be misled by companies offering to get you top ranking positions on thousands of search engines. In reality there are only a few big search engines and people mostly use content from those big few.”
The workshop at which Mr Khan was speaking covered important topics pertaining to SEO — such as its scope in Pakistan, important search engines and directories, optimising a heavy graphic website, monitoring search rankings and site traffic.
SEO is defined as the development and designing of websites according to the guidelines and policies which help search engines find webpages easily. The goal of SEO is to have website pages listed according to the results of searches and to turn traffic into paying clientele.
The workshop was organised especially for the marketing executives who are supposed to promote their companies’ or their clients’ websites, webmasters who want to increase traffic to their sites, small business owners eager to learn how to promote their websites on search engines, owners of e-commerce websites, website designers who want to offer search engine marketing services to their clients, and fresh graduates willing to learn SEO.
Day one of the workshop covered fundamental topics. There are three big search engines — Google, Yahoo! and MSN — and two big directories, Dmoz and Looksmart, said the speakers. An overview on what search engines considered “SPAM” was also presented.
Here is the list of SPAM techniques:
— Cloaking;
— Link farming;
— Blog and forum SPAM;
— Keyword stuffing;
— Hidden text;
— Useless meta-tags;
— Misuse of directories, and;
— Redirector.
Speakers at the event also described the importance of the “title tag” of a website. One of the experts said, “Title tag is the most important feature of a website.
“Almost all search engines evaluate the webpage with title tag and check the relevancy with other elements of the page. Search engines also present results of a search by displaying webpage titles as links in the first line of each query result.”
The step-by-step optimisation of each page of the website was another useful and interesting topic for the audience. On this issue, Mr Khan pointed out that a website was the collection of relevant webpages which were linked to each other.
“To optimise a website you need to concentrate on each page. So basically you are going to optimise individual pages, which is called ‘page optimisation’.”
You may carry out page optimisation as follows:
a) Group the relevant keywords, but don’t exceed the limit of five words per page.
b) Distribute keywords with their relevance to web content, and;
c) Keywords density should be 5 to 15 per cent, depending on the situation.
A very significant issue for web designers — search engine compatibility — was also part of the discussion. On the issue, one of the organisers said user friendliness, attractive design, beautiful flash animation and easy navigation were the elements which must be kept in mind while designing websites.
But, what is a website without visitors? Websites compatible with search engines are designed and developed keeping the search engine policies and algorithms in mind, which enable websites to be easily crawled and understood by engines.
He also gave certain tips:
— Try to put the menu on the right hand side of the site;
— Position content on the left hand side;
— Avoid keeping main navigation in JavaScript;
— Ideally the main navigation should be in plain text;
— Use text-based navigation at the bottom, if you are using image-based navigation at the top;
— Use keyword-oriented “Alt” image attribute, but don’t over do this;
— Use link title for image-based hyper links;
— Use flash as a plug-in option, rather than as a directly running one;
— Optimise the graphical images;
— Avoid using frames;
— Avoid using complex nesting in tables;
— Use external CSS and JavaScript;
— Check complete website for errors, broken links and orphan pages;
— Validate complete html before going online, and;
— Create robots.txt file to guide search engine spiders.
The use of robots.txt is required when:
— A website is under construction and one doesn’t want unfinished work to appear in search engines;
— You want scripts and CSS files not to be crawled by search engine because there is no need;
— The presence of irrelevant directories like cgi-bin or error pages, and;
— You have some sensitive information which you don’t want to appear in search engines.
“Who doesn’t like beautiful graphics on a website?” he asked. “Of course, an image equals 1,000 words. That reflects the importance of an image.”
Some essential tips to optimise heavy-graphic websites, as described by the speaker, were:
— Reduce the size of the images with image compression software;
— Try to call some images in the background. Images on the background don’t count in page size, and;
— Images with larger dimensions should be sliced.
The second day of the event dealt with link popularity. We all know how important link popularity is for better rankings in top search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.
A few tips to build link popularity, as presented during the discussion, were:
— Avoid linking to FFA (Free For All) sites;
— Avoid link exchange and link purchase;
— Get links from relevant industrial portals;
— Make a signature using your site link and try to post to forums. Don’t post just to get the link;
— Get links from classified websites, and;
— Get links from relevant websites/pages or relevant categories.
Submission of websites to search directories was another important issue which was discussed on the occasion. “A web directory is a huge resource of categorised links pointing to websites. It provides active links to websites in relevant categories. Most web directories are handled by human editors,” explained Mr Khan.
Towards the end of the conference, he defined some useful SEO and internet marketing resources. Some of these are: Word Tracker http://www.wordtracker.com; Internet Seer www.internetseer.com; ClickZ http://www.clickz.com; Internet World Stats http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm; and, Search Engine Strategies http://www.searchenginestrategies.com.
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