Wednesday

Web Development

Using Keywords in Text and Keeping URL Short

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After looking at headings, many search engines will start 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.

But, if you are following well-structured markup practices, the first place most engines will look after headings is text formatted as life a paragraph. So, when you are preparing your content for the Web, be sure that here are plenty of keywords worked into your content, again following a balanced approach everywhere 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 must be included in your keyword meta element, too.

Keeping URLs Small and Relevant

This is a topic that’spopped up right through this series, and for excellent 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 simpler it’s vacant to be to promote and to catalog.

For example, www.indometric.com/articles/ is vacant to be a honestly simple URL to promote, whereas www.indometric.com/category/web-enhancement/ is vacant to have numerous pitfalls. So, keep URLs as small and sweet as you maybe 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 made URLs or those that show a conference ID.

Deliberate 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 right page. The reason is due to the conference ID life added to the URL. That ID is specific to my conference, not yours, and will cause problems when another person tries to resolve the URL.

ExperiencedWeb developers and programmers will know that they must remove the conference ID, but these issues can and must 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 make lawful except you escape the ampersand within the URL.

Solicit Reciprocal Links

The more people link to your site, the more “vital” that Web address will grow to many search engines, with the site ranking improving based on its popularity. This is called reciprocal linking. One scam you must 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 enhancement, Web design, and computer book topics that I have linked to molly.com, the better my ranking is vacant to be.

You can increase linking a number of ways further than 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, here are often Webrings—groups of related sites with links from one to the next—and these can be a fantastic 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 vacant 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 choose, or are told, that you need to research SOEs or other groups that can help 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 really find someone who will help you with resources and really contribute to your goals, but again, the likelihood of that is very low.