HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Pleasing the robots is not enough in itself to earn a high search engine
ranking for a website. he search engine ranking of a site for any keyword or
phrase is a complex calculation that takes into account the amount of traic to
the site, how well the site's URL is distributed on other high-ranking websites
in association with the search term, and the prior history of people using that
search term. Increasing search-originated traic and improving a website's
ranking by making it more popular are the art and practice of online market-
ing. hat job is made easier by good SEO practices.
Part of the history that search engines accumulate is a website's
bounce
rate
. his is an estimate of the percentage of users who, ater clicking a link
on a results page for a given search term, do not stay on the selected website
long enough to indicate that they have found what they were looking for. You
can monitor the bounce rate for any page of a website by signing up for a free
Google analytics account and installing its tracking tools, which also improves
its estimates. Poor SEO can result in a high bounce rate, because the robots
have diiculty identifying the relevant keywords from the noise and may
improperly categorize the website.
he Web has numerous guides to good SEO. his is a lively topic of discus-
sion in the blogosphere as well as in topics, magazine articles, meetups, and
trade shows. But mostly, good SEO starts with writing good HTML. Here are
ten basic principles to get you started:
Use semantic markup
for sections, divisions, headings, paragraphs,
blockquotes, lists, and other block elements. If something is a heading,
give it heading markup for the robots, and use
id
,
class
, and
style
attri-
butes to make it look right for humans. he following two lines of HTML
will look approximately the same to humans:
.
<p><span style="font: 18pt arial;"><b>
The Meaning Of Life
</
b><span></p>
<h1 style="font-family: arial;">
The Meaning Of Life
</h1>
but only the second line is optimized for search engines.
Write keyword-rich content
containing relevant search phrases as they
are most commonly used. Avoid the temptation to use clever metaphors,
cultural references, or puns. his technique is overused in magazines,
where editorial and advertising copywriters compete to grab readers'
attention by ofering the unexpected. Consider a feature article titled
“Grime and Punishment” about how a small city is sentencing serial
.
