Undergraduate Postgraduate taught

Search undergraduate courses



Search postgraduate
taught courses
























[Important data protection stuff]

Select the image that matches the one in the box

icon4 icon1 icon2 icon3 icon4
 

Undergraduate Open Days

Location:
Date:
Date:

Postgraduate Open Days

Date:










Select the image that matches the one in the box

icon4 icon1 icon2 icon3 icon4
 

A web author's guide to search engines

Part 3 - How not to make search engines work for you...

How not to make search engines work for you...

  1. Ignore the advice in this guide. Your website might be competing with thousands of others. If only a handful of those are taking steps to improve their search engine performance, then you should be doing so too.
  2. You won't gain much, if any, advantage by using words common words like 'web', 'WWW' or 'computer' as keywords: you should try to find words that will help distinguish your pages from the other X million that mention 'web', 'WWW' and 'computer'...
  3. Not so long ago, it was possible to trick robots by repeating keywords dozens or hundreds of times - a technique known as 'keyword spamming'. These keywords were usually put in a meta tag, or hidden somewhere on the web page in a small font of the same colour as the background. More recent tricks include 'cloaking', where a web page includes scripts that deliver different content to search engine robots to the content seen by normal users. Search engines soon get wise to these tricks and they don't like them. Google, for example, warns that if it finds sites employing these techniques they will be excluded from its index, with no guarantee that they will be re-indexed even when cleaned up. There is a distinction between trying to make sure search engines list your pages effectively (as recommended here) and trying to trick your way to the top.
  4. Link farming is another trick that has come and very quickly gone. As search engines started to consider things like link popularity, pages that consisted of nothing but hundreds of links to other pages appeared. Search engines now analyse link patterns to block these practices. There are no shortcuts.

[top of page]

Conclusion: three ways to improve your search engine ranking

  1. Improve your pages' relevance for search terms by using an appropriate selection of keywords in your page titles, headings and the first few lines of text on your pages.
  2. Improve the presentation of your pages in search result listings: use a descriptive, context-free page title; use the 'Description' meta tag; pay attention to the opening text on your pages.
  3. Make sure your content is as effective as possible: the 'Back' button is one of the most frequently used features of a web browser - if your page is dull and uninviting users will return to the search page and look for something else.

[top of page]

Further information

  • How To Be #1 On Search Engines (almost...). Part of the Web Developer's Virtual Library.
  • Wordle will generate a word cloud if you copy all the text from your web page and paste it in, for a quick visual guide to the dominant keywords on your page.
  • Addme's keyword density tool provides a keyword count, which gives an indication of which words might be indexed from your page.
  • Market Leap's search engine saturation, link popularity and keyword checking tools.

[...Previous ]

© 2011 University of Essex. All rights reserved.Webmaster enquiries