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Search Engine Optimization: Designing a Search-Friendly Site

Reprinted with permission from the STC Intercom magazine - December 2002 Volume 49, Issue 10.

This article is the third in a series on search engine optimization (SEO), a business marketing strategy that manipulates Internet search engines. To read the first and second installments, see Intercom's April and September/October 2002 issues, respectively.

I strongly recommend implementing SEO early in the Web design process. While Flash and database-driven sites have their utility, the sites that return good rankings are designed in search-engine-friendly HTML. When you build a site in HTML, a search engine spider can crawl and index every page of your site. One person told me she found my site by entering "Dreamweaver 3.0 Hilliard Ohio" into a search engine. These words are not included in my keywords. They are, however, in the HTML resume on my site. My last column discussed optimizing your META tags for searchability, but there are other tricks for making your site spider-friendly.

What's a Spider?

A spider is a software program operated by a search engine that surfs the Web, visits a Web site, records all the words on the pages, and notes links to other sites. The spider follows every link and reads, indexes, and stores the pages to which the links lead.

Search engine spiders are not very sophisticated. Most spider software was written back when most Web sites had gray backgrounds, almost no graphics, and lots of text, so spiders like simple and easy-to-parse HTML. Today’s Web design has left spiders behind. People tend to use the latest and greatest technology, so many sites are built without any consideration of spiders.

Spiders do two things: index text and follow links. If you don’t have pages of text or links to other pages that contain text, the spiders will leave empty-handed. If your targeted keywords are not "amplified" so that they appear to be a significant component of the Web page, the search engine will not assign them much importance, and your page will not attain rankings on those keywords.

Content, Content, Content

The biggest tip I have on SEO is that no matter how great your site looks, spiders--and people--love content. If you want to generate traffic, add lots of content to your site. Unless your site provides high-quality, regularly updated content, visitors will not return often and are unlikely to recommend your site to others. Ultimately, to generate long-term traffic, you must provide content that your target audience is looking for. I have read reports saying that regularly updating your site (perhaps weekly), brings the search engine spiders back to index it. My work on the Oklahoma Indian Times site (www.okit.com) suggests that this is true--I updated the site weekly, and new stories were regularly listed on the search engines.

After your META tags, the content on your home page is the most important determinant of your site's rankings. Ensure that your content not only appeals to search engines but also includes a strong marketing message to appeal to your potential customers. Do not write your content to appeal strictly to search engines--a laundry list of keyword phrases will turn away prospective customers the moment they hit your site. Remember that your content needs to trumpet your benefits, build rapport, and immediately tell your prospects "what's in it for them." A winning combination of spider-happy and customer-friendly text will help you get the high rankings you want--and convert that targeted traffic into paying clients. (For more information about writing keyword-rich main page text, see my July newsletter.)

As much as possible, build your content in simple HTML code. Text on pages that the search engines can’t reach--such as a Flash or database-driven site--won't help your rankings. The search engines must be able to follow links from your home page to other pages on your site that contain content. In a previous column ("Marketing Your Web Business," Intercom, January 2002), I advised Web designers to create a Links section on their sites. If you link to relevant sites, they will often return the favor by linking to yours. Many of the big search engines take into account the links on your site and the quality of sites linking to yours when they rank your site. So add those links!

You can use these ideas for pages other than the home page--such as product pages or article pages. On my Web site, which includes HTML versions of articles I've written, I optimize each article's page using these tips.

Spider-Friendly Design - this is a work around for an image map.

The secret to increasing search engine visibility is to focus on interaction with the search engines. Provide a site map. A site map is a categorized list of all the pages on your site, which can make it easier for a search engine spider to find all your pages. There must be one or more links to the site map from the home page. Make sure you have a text link to the site map at the bottom of the page. The text should say "Site Map," and the file should be called "sitemap.htm."

Spider Workarounds

Some design elements actually hinder a site's searchability. The following are some roadblocks and their workarounds to consider before you start designing your site.

Frames Design

Although frames make Web site design and navigation somewhat easier, they can wreak havoc on SEO, because many search engines are still not capable of reading the content in frames. When a search engine views a framed site, the spider often will see only the framed navigation to the sections of the site, not the pages.

There are several workaround options for frames. The first: Say no! to frames. Another solution is a doorway page. Often seen on sites that use Flash (and highly recommended by usability professionals), a doorway page allows the user to choose to enter a frames or no-frames site. You can then optimize the no-frames site.

A third solution, if you really want to use frames, is to make sure that spiders can index the site by using high-quality information. To do this, you must develop excellent META tags and descriptions for your site. Then compose an alternate no-frames site, placing the same content between <NOFRAMES> tags. The spiders can "see" the text between the <NOFRAMES> tags, but the user will not. Set the <NOFRAMES> section of your code immediately below the first <FRAMESET> tag, so that you present its keyword-rich content close to the top of the page. When you design this page, be sure to include the links to other pages in your site, so the spider can navigate to those pages and index them as well.

Because extra tags used to set up frames dilute the density of the keywords in proportion to other words on the page, you should definitely consider linking informational pages to a crawler page--an HTML page that lists every URL that you want the spider to index. (For more information on crawler pages, see "The Scoop on Search Engines," Intercom, January 2001.) You can also create a two-frame frameset in which one frame is only one pixel in height. In this mini-frame, you can place your informational pages within the <NOFRAMES> tags. Informational pages are just that--HTML pages with information about your site that you can optimize to attract spiders. Your users don't even have to see them; sometimes SEO professionals build them simply to increase ratings. The informational pages should have no frames at all but should simply point users to the main site that uses frames.

Graphics or Multimedia Design

A beautiful graphic on the main page of your Web site can be attractive to your visitors, unless it affects download time. Sites that use Flash or other multimedia elements are often great-looking animated works of art, but when it comes to the search engine game, these elements--particularly on the home page--do nothing to enhance your site’s visibility. Spiders interpret Flash and multimedia as graphics, and they are blind to any content in graphics. If a graphic includes information, you should provide alternate (<ALT>) text to help make that content visible to spiders, but be aware that not all spiders can read tags.

You can also create a keyword-rich doorway page that links to both a Flash site and an HTML site. Or, using the mini-frame option, you can place your content within the <NOFRAMES> tags. Still another, less visually pleasing, option is to alternate your use of Flash with static content.

Many Web designers like to use image maps rather than navigation buttons for site navigation. Although image maps are visually pleasing, not all spiders can index links or text in an image map. Also, placing image maps at the top of the page pushes important keyword-containing text farther down on the page.

If you want to keep an image map on your site, add a set of text navigational links at the bottom of your page. All spiders can follow text links.

JavaScript

JavaScript is a programming code. Search engines cannot parse the JavaScript source code to read any keywords or navigational links within the code. Also, because most designers insert JavaScript code within the <HEAD> tags of the HTML document so that it will load first, your body copy gets pushed farther down the Web page. This decreases the prominence of the targeted keywords and phrases on your site.

Dynamic Content Design

If you pull content from a database, your pages may include an ASCII character (such as "?," "=," or "!") in some of its Web addresses. Such characters represent either escape characters for CGI (computer-generated imaging) scripts or database results, and they pose a search visibility problem. Spiders avoid URLs with these characters because they can lead them into huge recursive traps, where the database or CGI script feeds the spider an infinite array of URLs and the same page endlessly. If your platform selection includes ASP (active server pages), Cold Fusion, or a database option that yields ASCII characters in the URL, you will have to adapt your pages through workarounds.

The best workarounds for frames, Flash, Java, and sites using dynamic content design are an HTML-only duplicate site, a site with some pages in HTML, a doorway page with an HTML option, or a crawler page. The more optimized pages in HTML, the better your rankings in search engines. One page optimized in one of these types of sites will not produce rankings as good as four or five optimized HTML pages would.

Password-Protected Areas

If areas of your site are password protected, a spider cannot find the content in those areas. Spiders may be excellent at crawling the Web, but they do not pick locks, and they cannot fill out a form to get a password to your site.

If you want your site to be visible to spiders, consider developing content areas that are open to the anonymous viewer. By attracting search engines, these pages can help market your valuable password-protected information.

Cookie Requirements

Cookies are small text files that browsers keep on the user’s hard disk. They allow the site to remember the user’s identity and may contain a customer or visitor ID. Spiders are programmed to reject cookies, so if your site requires that visitors accept a cookie to enter, you will be creating a spider-unfriendly site.

META Refresh Tags

Even if you haven't used the META refresh tag in design, you have undoubtedly seen it in action. If you have ever been automatically redirected to another site, you have encountered the META refresh tag. Some unethical SEO experts will optimize pages for certain keywords--and redirect users to sites that have nothing to do with those keywords. The search engines’ rule of thumb here is that taking less than ten seconds to transition to the actual Web site is a form of "spamdexing." (See the sidebar for more information on spamdexing.) This tag has been so overused by adult Web sites and SEO pros to redirect traffic to their sites that most search engines have programmed their spiders to avoid or ignore refresh pages. So it’s a good idea for you to avoid using them.

Conclusion

I have used several of these workarounds with great results. The best advice I can give you when you design a site is to remember that search engine spiders do two things: index text and follow links. So making a site that is easily accessible to them will yield great results! If you have any success stories, please feel free to e-mail them to me!

Sidebar - Spamdexing Goes to Court

Spamdexing refers to techniques some Web designers use to trick search engines. One method involves putting trademarked names into META code to draw traffic from popular business sites. For example, if I invented a new cola called "Theresa’s Best Cola," I might be tempted to use keywords associated with my competitors, such as "Coca-Cola" and "Pepsi Cola." In the old days of SEO, search engines simply banished spamdexers from their hit lists. These days, this type of spamdexing is called trademark infringement, and you can find its users in federal court.

Trademark law prohibits a wide range of misleading business practices, from those that mischaracterize products as belonging to a competitor to those that falsely suggest an affiliation with another party. Trademarked terms embedded in the META code of a business's site can suggest that the products and services on that site are associated with those of the trademark owner.

In Playboy Enterprises v. Calvin Designer Label (985 F. Supp. 1220 (N.D. Cal. 1997)), Playboy, owner of the federally registered trademarks “Playboy” and “Playmate,” sued two adult entertainment companies that had inserted "Playboy," "Playmate," and "Playboy Magazine" as invisible META tags several hundred times into their Web sites. The court ruled that the defendant’s inclusion of Playboy’s trademarks as META tags was likely to cause confusion, falsely represented the origin and contents of the defendant’s sites, and diluted Playboy’s famous trademarks.

But in the case Playboy Enterprises v. Welles (1998 WL 329674 (S.D. Cal. May 21, 1998)), the court turned down Playboy’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have barred a former Playboy Playmate’s use of "Playboy" and "Playmate" as META tags on her own Web site. The court ruled that the defendant was making fair use of the trademarks in the visible text of her site to describe herself and her title truthfully. Ms. Welles used the phrases “Playboy Playmate of the Year,” “Playmate of the Year 1981,” and “PMOY” in the visible content of her Web site and used the terms “Playboy” and “Playmate” as META tags. She did not use Playboy’s bunny logo or stylized letters and provided disclaimers that her site was not sponsored by or affiliated with Playboy. The court found that her visible use of the trademarks was unlikely to cause confusion because she used them only to fairly describe herself. For the same reason, it also found that her use of "Playboy" and "Playmate" as META tags was appropriate.

Even though the Welles decision provides some comfort for webmasters who visibly but fairly use someone else’s trademarked terms on their Web sites, tread carefully. Risking a court battle is not worth the extra hits you may get by sneaking in these extra keywords.

References for sidebar

Baron, Robert. "Metatags Raise Serious Legal Issues" New York Law Journal, September 14, 1998. (www6.law.com/ny/tech/091498s3.html)

Gooding, Dan "Judge Acts in ‘Metatag’ Case." CNET News.com, September 15, 1997. (news.com.com/2100-1023-203251.html)

References

Bruemmer, Paul J. "SEO and the Web Site Design Process." ClickZ. December 19, 2001. (www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/942651)

Bruemmer, Paul J. "Understanding the Power of Search Engine Marketing." ClickZ. October 24, 2001. (www.clickz.com/search/opt/article.php/909181)

Farrell, Tom. "Search Engine Optimisation." User News. October 8, 2001. (infocentre.frontend.com/servlet/Infocentre?access=no&page=article&rows=5&id=232)

Lloyd-Martin, Heather "How to Write a Keyword-Rich Home Page the Search Engines Will Love!" Rank Write Roundtable. (www.rankwrite.com/writehomepage.htm)

Lloyd-Martin, Heather "Six Secrets to Search Engine Writing Success." Rank Write Roundtable. (www.rankwrite.com/6searchwritingsecrets.htm)

Marckini, Fredrick. Search Engine Positioning. Plano, Tex.: Wordware Publishing, 2001.

Nobles, Robin. "Top Mistakes When Optimizing Web Pages." WebProNews. January 7, 2002. (www.Webpronews.com)

O’Neill, Susan, and Robin Nobles. Streetwise Maximize Web Site Traffic: Build Web Site Traffic Fast and Free by Optimizing Search Engine Placement. Holbrook, Mass.: Adams Media Corp., 2000.

Whalen, Jill. "Paying for Placement." Rank Write Roundtable. (www.rankwrite.com/payforplacement.htm)

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