d6

Writing for search engines at a glance

Site Genre: Pattern Group d

magnify imageFigure D6.1 E-LOAN keeps most of its keyword-filled content high on the homepage, which helps it score high on search engine rankings.

Background

When searching the Internet, or an intranet, people will not be able to find your site if it appears too many pages away from the front of the search results list. Your site needs as high a ranking as possible on the list so that customers can find it quickly and regularly. The writing on a site becomes critical for a high listing because most search engines index words to build a database of search results. This pattern provides the solution for writing pages that will be highly ranked by search engines.

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PROBLEM

It is difficult to find a site on a list of search engine results if it is too far down the list. Making a site appear toward the top of any search requires writing site content in customized ways.

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SOLUTION

magnify image Figure D6.4 Use the page title, keywords, and descriptive text in your Web pages to help ensure high rankings in Web search results.

Begin by writing distinctive HTML titles for every page because they are used as the page title in search results and sometimes search engines rank pages higher if search terms are contained in titles. Use keywords, those you would use most frequently to describe the site’s purpose and offering to customers, at the top of each page and in the body of the text. Include descriptive tags representative of the content contained in each page. Make your site accessible to people with impaired vision because doing so also helps search engines. Avoid rigging the system with bogus keywords and text an approach that is often counterproductive.

Other Patterns to Consider

DISTINCTIVE HTML TITLES (D9) are important to search engines because programmers often use HTML titles as the leading description for each search hit in the ORGANIZED SEARCH RESULTS (J3) page, and because they are often favorably weighted if they contain search keywords. If you position the most often used keywords about the category of service that your site provides ABOVE THE FOLD (I2), search engines are sure to include those words. Make your site accessible. SITE ACCESSIBILITY (B9) also helps search engines by making the non-textual content textual, such as by giving images text descriptions. When these descriptions contain keywords, they become part of a search engine’s index.

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