A Few Search Engine Optimization Tips
The learning curve for Google’s AdWords can be a steep and expensive. Here are a few things we learned for ourselves during our education. Simple to apply, they were a bit of a struggle for us to recognize and verify. Here are four of them:
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Demerits For Long Sentences
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Content Is What A Visitor Sees
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Keyword Cosmetics
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Know Your Customer
Demerits For Long Sentences
There are many tools, many online and free, that analyze a web page for various statistical distributions, along with various measures of how Google might judge for relevancy and quality. One of these measures is sentence length, and some of the analyzers detect sentence termination differently. In particular, they look explicitly for a period, exclamation point or question mark as a sentence terminator in both ordered and unordered list items, not the </li> or </ol> or </ul> closing tags. This is not a problem for a human reader, but web spider and robot programs do not have the gift of context, and may see these as a long sentence that probably doesn’t make much syntactical sense. The way to avoid this is to put a period at the end of every list item. It doesn’t look all that bad, and it eliminates the possibility of demerits for run-in sentences that we used to get in grade school.
Content Is What A Visitor Sees
The displayable text is what a visitor sees, but it is not the only thing that is analyzed by the ranking engines, which can see text that a visitor does not see. Javascript and stylesheet directives will also be included the ranking process, which can have some interesting, and unusual, side effects when analyzed by a search engine. Avoid this problem by placing all javascipt and style directives in separate files.
Keyword Cosmetics
Keywords that art highlighted by the bold/strong tag may (or may not) be considered by the ranking engines. But the strong tag may result in the keyword being rendered in a way that is difficult to read because of the background, or otherwise aesthetically challenged. One way to modify is with the CSS span tag that envelops the keyword within the strong tag brackets. The span tag’s class can then change the color, weight, or whatever, leaves the strong attributes intact. As en example:
…<strongKeyword</strong>…
would become
…<strong><span class=”kwmf”>Keyword</span></strong>…
And the CSS file would define:
.kwmf { font-weight: normal; color: #eeee00; }
Know Your Customer
MS Word’s SpellCheck tool has an option (ShowReadabilityStatistics checkbox) that analyzes and displays various readability statistics, including a Flesch Reading Ease measure, and a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level value. This is a good way to make the content easier and simpler to read. Visitors’ attention span is limited, and they may have gotten to the web page by clicking on a 130 character AdWord.