Design for Search Engines

If you don't write your site with search engines in mind, chances are your listings, if they are accepted at all, will not result in a lot of visitors. We will explain a few of the issues here.

What do the search engines look for?

Binoculars

To get a visible listing in a search engines, you will need to pay attention to the following items in coding your web pages.

We are not going to explain here exactly how to code these elements. Instead, we will give you a brief overview, followed by links to more comprehensive resources on the subject

The <title> element

Most graphical browsers show the contents of this element at the top of the browser window. The title we used for this particular page is "Beginners Web Design Tutorial - Search Engines". This is coded in the <head> section of our document. Most search engines use this as the title for your site.

It is important to get this right - if it says nothing about the site, you may not get many visitors, even if your site is listed at no.1 for certain keywords or phrases. It is very important to include some of your keywords in this element. In the case of this page, the important keywords and phrases are "Beginners", "Web Design", "Tutorial" and "Search Engines". Aim for a title that is between 30 and 60 characters long.

The <meta> tags

There are a number of meta tags, some of which are used by (most) search engines. The three most useful (for search engines) are: description, keywords and robots:

Description:
Here we would put a short description about the page. Opinions differ about how much information can be stored here. Some tutorials recommend a maximum of 200 characters, others are more generous. It does depend on which search engines you are targeting. Again, include a number of keywords that relate to the page here.
Keywords
This is where you put the actual keywords you want the page to be found under. Ideally, you should have between 500 and 800 characters, with no word repeated too often (2-3 repeated words is usually deemed acceptable). Choose keywords with care and make sure about 10-20 of them are used in the text of the page. This makes them more relevant and may give you a higher ranking in the search engines
Robots
Not all search engines take notice of this meta tag. However, some will honour the contents. It is useful if you want to exclude some pages from search engine listings. As an example, you could have contents of noindex,follow (do not index the page, but follow links) or index,follow.

The very first paragraph

Some search engines take the description from the first paragraph on the site. In addition, some web directories are edited by people, rather than programs. Often they will make up a description based on what they read in the first paragraph of the site. So make sure it has meaningful information, preferably a summary of what the page (or site, in the case of the "home" page) is about.

The overall content of the page

As we mentioned a few times, relevancy is important. Some people use dirty tricks to try and get their site listed at the top of search engines. For instance, we have seen sites that repeat a keyword or phrase dozens, if not hundreds of times on a "doorway" page or even on the home page. They have hidden this text by making it the same colour as the page background.

Some search engines have ways to detect such dirty tricks and may ban the site. Our competitors have been lucky in that regard, but it won't last. Besides, many people who visit the site will find it hard to navigate and will find very little actual information and leave.

Do make sure however that the keywords (mentioned before) reflect the content of the page. Repeat them in the text, but in a sensible way, so visitors to the site will stay a while and explore the site. Here's a little exercise for you: how often have we mentioned "keyword" and "search engine" on this page?

Further Reading