
On a recent post on the Cre8asite forums, a poster was requesting help regarding SEO. One of the replies was from Black_Night aka Ammon Johns, who very clearly and concisely guided the person in the right direction. I have attached a snapshot of the post and link to the post for anybody who needs some help getting the sites ranking better in the search engines
The post from Black_Night went as followsYou're trying too hard, and are paying too much attention to SEO rumours and not enough to what HTML codes really mean.
Quote:
That's not a Title, its a keyword list.
What makes for a good title? Short for a start. Tell me what your page is about in 3-8 words. 5 words would be about ideal. 60 characters including spaces and punctuation is all you can expect to display in SERPs.
The Title is the headline of your classified ad in the SERPs. Make it grab my attention and want to read.
Quote:
That is the kind of content for the Keywords Meta. It is not a description of the page, but again a list of keywords. If I saw this as a blurb for a listing it wouldn't inspire me to click at all. It is not the body of a classified ad, so won't work like one in the SERPs.
Quote:
< meta name="robot" content="index, follow"/>
< meta name="robots" content="index, follow"/>
< meta name="rating" content="General"/>
< meta name="revisit-after" content="7 days"/>
< meta name="ROBOTS" content="ALL"/>
You've wasted a lot of time telling spiders what to do here, when none of these work the way you think. Spiders don't accept instructions on what to do, only on what NOT to do. By having so many Robots tags, each is contradicting the others and making them all invalid. You don't need any robots tags except to exclude spiders from a default action. To have more than one isn't just overkill, it makes the entire page unclear and invalid. The failsafe for a spider unsure of what you are so strongly trying to tell it not to do, is not to do anything, just to be safe.
The revisit-after meta is one of the oldest jokes on the 'net. It is a proprietary meta tag (meaning one particular place made it up) created by Search BC many many years ago. They stopped using it many many years ago too. When it was used, it was not an accelerator, but a throttle.
When you told the Search BC bot to revisit after 7 days, it meant do not return to this page for at least 7 days because that's about how often I change anything. If Search BC's bots that indexed a page were scheduled to return again soon after to crawl the links, it would skip that next visit, and only return when it had next scheduled a visit (usually a month later) provided that was longer than your revisit-after tag content.
The tag has had absolutely no value or use in this millennium. It is however a sure-fire way to spot webmasters who have based everything they learned on merely copying other people's code.
You have used several H1 tags in your code for a single page. That indicates that you maybe don't understand heirachical markup. For certain, each one after the first is diluting the value of them all. Just like any title, the heading of a page is supposed to be a succinct indication of what the document is about. Again, I'd say that about 5 or 6 words is often ideal.
Now add up all the words in all the H1 tags on your page. How many words? If the weight of a H1 tag divided by 5-6 words would give each word a certain amount of extra significance, then how much could/would you dilute that significance to each word by dividing the weight of that "concise summary" benefit between 20-24 words? Each word would have only a quarter of the weight.
There should really only be one H1 tag in a document, as it is the Heading of that Document. Section headings would then be H2 tags to show that they are within the overall topic of the H1. Sub-headings within a section would therefore be H3 tags. The heirachy of the numbers is to show which things come under which other things.
H1 the topmost cannot be superceded, and so is the document as a whole.
H2 is the next most and can only be under a H1. Another H2 following the first indicates a change of topic within the overall topic of the H1.
H3 is something that deserves a heading within the area lead by a H2. If a H3 is followed by another H3, it indicates another subheading of the last H2. If followed by a H2, it indicates that what follows is another major division, and not on under the same heading of the previous H2.
This is what we call semantic markup. It helps all kinds of devices to understand the structure of the document and its contents. It helps them to know which parts relate to which other parts and with what proximity. LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing can attempt to make sense of even less obvious clues about meanings and relationships. We know that the science of information retrieval is very interested in semantics and structure. If you are going to use code, make sure of what it means. The bigger numbers don't exist just so you can tell a search engine which words are important. They exist so that you can tell it what you are really talking about, and help it to prevent matching a word in one section against a word in a different and unrelated section to match a search.
Example: You have a page showing product details for some power tool, and after the section about that product itself, you have a section talking about shipping charges that says you do free shipping on orders over $200. The words 'free' and 'tool' both appear on your page. But you don't offer free tols, only free shipping on larger orders of tools. Good semantic code would help the search engine see that the two things are in separate sections of the document and therefore not directly related.
Also, the JavaScript you have should be cleaned up and put in an external .JS file so as not to bloat the code for user-agents that don't use JS anyway, which is all spiders, and any browser with JS disabled, etc. Not only will this make your site faster, the code leaner and easier for a spider to index and process, but it will also save you a lot in data-transfer each year, and could, if your site becomes successful, significantly lower your running costs
The post in question can be found here, in the Cre8asite forums of which Ammon Johns is a member
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