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I"m hoping people can give specifics for both Google and Yahoo.
andsieg888
Re spidering, use version 3.0 html (or thereabouts) and ensure each page is linked from another page accessible from the home page, and use a sitemap.
On-Page elements are elements that can be controlled on a page by page basis. They include:
Text Tags – The H tags are frequently looked at by the Search Engines to determine the importance of certain words on a page. For example, the Search Engine would expect that if there was a page that sold “Blue Widgets”, that somewhere on the page the words “Blue Widgets” would be contained in an <H1> tag. By this logic, if there were two identical pages with the words “Blue Widgets” on them, but one had the words “Blue Widgets” in an <H1> tag and the other did not, the one with the <H1> would be given a higher ranking for the search term “blue widgets”. This applies to all H tags in order.
Page Title – This is the most important On-Page element and is certainly the one that is given the most weight with the Search Engine algorithms. Search Engines expect that if a page is about “Blue Widgets”, the title of the page will be “Blue Widgets”. Again, if there were two identical pages with the only difference being that one had the title “Blue Widgets” and the other had the title “Company ABC”, the “Blue Widgets” page would perform better.
Text Placement – This element actually has a two-fold reason behind it. Text placement means how high up in the <body> of the page the words first appear. The Search Engines will reason that the higher up a word or phrase appears on a page, the more important that phrase is to the page.
Also, Search Engines are not all that different from people when looking at HTML code. They have a difficult time deciphering what in the code is “code” and what is text. The more “code” (HTML, JavaScript, etc.) that you put between the top of the page and the actual text of the page, the harder it is for a Search Engine to get through the gibberish (not that I think the code is gibberish, but a Search Engine does) to the text. Too much code between the top and the text may actually result in the Search Engine giving up on the page completely.
Frequently, this is dealt with by using includes for the JavaScript and by using CSS layers rather than tables (although, there is some debate as to whether layers or tables are best when factoring in the end user).
Meta Tags – These have certainly lost quite a bit of ground of the past several years due to the abuse of them, but there are still a few Search Engines that use the Keyword and Description meta tags as a minor part of their algorithm.
Keyword Density – This is ratio of how often the keyword appears on the page in relation to how many words are contained on the page. This is one of delicate balance because if the ration is too high, the page will be viewed as “spam”.
Keyword Tag Variation – This is how many different ways the keyword is displayed on the page. For example if “Blue Widgets” is displayed on a page three times, it will be given more credit if it appears once in italics, once in bold and once in a paragraph tag than if it were to appear all three times in just a paragraph tag.
I am a graphic designer and have been wandering through this forum/site looking for this information and you have presented it in a very easy-to-understand manner.
Thanks Again!
I'm hoping people can also talk about things like using subdomains as well as interlinking in more detail.
For example when interlinking is it better to focus on vertical interlinking in subcategories or horizontal linking between different subcategories?
For sub domains what are the advantages of using sub domains? How extensive should ones sub domains be?
Thanks again everybody for all the useful info!
