Content is the Key

Content is the Key

Web crawlers visits a site to read the title, description and content. However from the crawler perspective, if some thing is hard to read (i.e. not well defined / structured content), it will automatically leave site. Crawler always gives prominence to a page having 2:1 ratio in favor of content on at least 75% of the pages. Crawler loves more content to grab and index, and push such site on top of SERP.



Frame/Flash or Non Frame/Flash

Folks from Yahoo, Google and MSN, have their web masters pages showing that "some web crawlers have difficulty reading the context of these pages". What they doesn't say is don't use flash or framed pages because this is a no-no. Lot of SEO's will try and tell that this is a bad thing and that all your pages need to be flat static pages with lots of alt text behind your flat images. This is not the case. Many websites are in the top ten and number one spots, some of which use both flash and framed pages. Some do not even have any indexable text or links on the home page. So how do we do it? Simple, always have an alternative version of your site which viewers with flash installed will be directed to. For a framed site, you should also have a non-framed version for people whose browsers don't support framed pages. Now that you know how simple it is, here is the temptation. Because your index page will most likely only be seen by maybe 10% of the people that come to your site, the temptation will be to flood that page with keywords and search text to get yourself bumped up the search and that will happen. However, when you get caught (which you will), you will be dumped. This page should only contain a stripped down version of your site and should only contain the same text content as your flash or framed site.



Keyword Iterations

One should always have content on their website for their visitor and not for the crawler. In a move to spider the pages we often fall prey to Keyword Flooding and it hampers the overall objective a big time.


Use it in style

Well defined style sheets always helps the cause of optimising the site for better SERP. However if they are misused then they are treated by Crawler as a non trusted resource. Things like making the H1 tag the same as the normal text style to try and make the crawler think that all the text is important, should be highly discouraged. Crawlers are not as dumb as the used to be. They figured out that nobody has a header that lasts 5 paragraphs. The proper use of the H1 tag is your main page header. Sites have negative impact when pages carry loads of hidden content, refrain from using any such technique. The crawler should always authorise to read the Style-sheet. If not, the crawler mark the site in their non trusted bucket.


Fresh air to breath
We all need fresh air to breath and we always love website pumped with new content. The crawler are also not left behind. They hate stale content and always give preference to sites loaded with new content. Means a site sitting at 6 position on SERP can drop to 12 in no time in case they are not fed with fresh content. I can bet many SEO guru overlook this important point.


Page Rank

If you have downloaded Google's toolbar, you will see a bar at the top of each page which gives you a rating from 1 to 10 of how Google ranks your site. This means absolutely nothing when it comes to search engine optimizing. Some search engine companies think that getting a high page rank means you are going to be listed higher in the search. This is not the case. In fact, it couldn't be further from the truth. What this little bar indicates is simply how important Google sees your site and it makes that judgment on the quality of sites that link to you. The single most important thing about your site is not page rank, it is not how many incoming links you have and it is not how long your site has been up. It is your content, plain and simple. If your content matches the search criteria, then you will be listed. The more relevant content you have, the higher your site will be listed. There are a lot of sites listed in the number one spot that don't have any page rank.



Linking all the way

Don't believe a word you hear about incoming links, the quality of the link or anything to do with link exchange because the truth is; it doesn't really matter how many links you have to your site and what sites link to you. What does matter is the way the sites link to you and how often new links show up to your site. If you wake up tomorrow and, overnight, 1 million other sites decided to link to you, that would not affect your position in any way (what it may do is hurt your listing because it will look like spam). Here is how links work for you:

A plastic surgeon linking to a plastic surgery site, give a boost because the plastic surgeon links to a site of some relevance.

Acquiring new links slowly over the course of time definitely boosts because it looks like the site is gaining popularity.

If internal pages of a site, as well as the home page of that site gains more linkages, that will boost because it looks like the site have lots of pages of relevant information.