After looking at headings, many search engines will begin grabbing your text for descriptions. For sites that aren’t built structurally and use tables for content, you’re really playing Russian roulette trying to assume which content the engine will grab.

However, if you are following well-structured markup practices, the first place most engines will look after headings is text formatted as being a paragraph. So, when you are preparing your content for the Web, be sure that there are plenty of keywords worked into your content, again following a balanced approach where you are enhancing the keyword count but not diminishing the content’s importance.

Here’s a welcome paragraph on a client’sWeb site:

I specialize in luxury homes in the Tucson foothills and University of Arizona area. I am also very knowledgeable about Tucson golf course properties and retirement neighborhoods. My business has been built by personal referrals, so I’m looking forward to getting to work with you.

Note some of the powerful keywords and combinations in use:

• luxury
• luxury homes
• homes
• Tucson
• Tucson foothills
• foothills
• University
• University of Arizona
• Arizona
• Tucson golf
• Tucson golf course
• golf
• golf course
• golf course properties
• Tucson golf course properties
• retirement
• retirement neighborhoods.

Naturally, all these keywords and terms should be included in your keyword meta element, too.

Keeping URLs Short and Relevant

This is a topic that’spopped up throughout this series, and for good reason. Whether you’re approaching it from the perspective of information architecture, usability, or ranking and promotions, the shorter and more logical your Web site address is, the easier it’s going to be to promote and to catalog.

For example, www.indometric.com/articles/ is going to be a fairly easy URL to promote, whereas www.indometric.com/category/web-development/ is going to have numerous pitfalls. So, keep URLs as short and sweet as you possibly can.

It’s also highly recommended that when you have a www within your domain name that a visitor is able to resolve your site with or without the initiating “www”—www.indometric.com and indometric.com resolve to the same location.

Another problem with URLs and promotion is dynamically created URLs or those that display a session ID.

Consider the following URL, a real URL to an article of mine:

http://www.informit.com/content/index.asp?product_id={F41929EF-0DCC-444C-AE9C-EA20A98C3853}&session_id={6C98C46C-F571-4647-890DAB05E18223DD}

Anyone who takes this URL and copies it into their browser window may encounter problems when the browser tries to resolve to the correct page. The reason is due to the session ID being added to the URL. That ID is specific to my session, not yours, and will cause problems when another person tries to resolve the URL.

ExperiencedWeb developers and programmers will know that they should remove the session ID, but these issues can and should be dealt with on the server-side. URLs of this nature go against most usability guidelines and cause serious problems when it comes to trying to promote specific pages within Web sites.

Did you catch the other problem with the extended URL? If you drop it as is into an XHTML document, it will not validate unless you escape the ampersand within the URL.

Solicit Reciprocal Links

The more people link to your site, the more “important” that Web address will appear to many search engines, with the site ranking improving based on its popularity. This is called reciprocal linking. One scam you should be aware of is that some SOEs and marketing firms will try to convince you that you need to populate “entry” pages—pages that link to your Web site—on other Web servers to increase links to you, thereby boosting your rank by tricking search engines into thinking that relevant Web pages have links to your site.

The best way to increase linking to you is to solicit it—especially from relevant and related Web sites. For example, the more Web sites related to Web development, Web design, and computer book topics that I have linked to molly.com, the better my ranking is going to be.

You can increase linking a number of ways beyond frank solicitation. Today’s Weblog software can be applied to businesses too, adding features with rolling “blogrolls”—links to related sites. For topically related sites, there are often Webrings—groups of related sites with links from one to the next—and these can be a great way to drive traffic to your sites. I’ve added my Web site to a number of rings in the past few years and have been astonished at the resulting increase in visitors to my site.Webrings are grouped by like interest (or geography, such as “Tucson Web sites”), so the people who come to your site as a result are likely going to have a pre-existing interest or need that your site can accommodate.

Do a search for <yourtopic webring> on any search engine and you’ll probably find an assortment of Webrings related to your topic, too.

If for some reason you do decide, or are told, that you need to research SOEs or other groups that can assist you with linking strategies, be as careful as you can to check out who you are working with. Who knows, you might be surprised and actually find someone who will help you with resources and actually contribute to your goals, but again, the likelihood of that is very low.