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It can be very frustrating to discover that your carefully
constructed pages are either not appearing high up in search
engine results or, worse yet, don't appear at all.
Improving search engine rankings is complicated by the broad
range of factors that influence rankings, the different
approaches to ranking taken by individual search engines and a
general air of secrecy on the part of the major search engine
developers about their methods. This secrecy is partly to protect
their proprietary techniques and competitive advantages but also
to prevent disreputable web developers from skewing search
results by taking advantage of particular ranking techniques.
With this in mind there are a few things you can do to improve
your search engine rankings.
Can I see you?
Ensuring your web site is listed in search engines used to
entail a fair bit of arcane work submitting the site to various
search engines. More recently, provided your site is linked to
from somewhere else on the Internet that is listed, search
engines will eventually find your site and index its contents.
Your web site or page will not be linked if it is inaccessible or
not linked to from somewhere else on the Internet. If your
website is locked behind a firewall or does not validate as good
HTML your content may not be indexed by search engines.
A common failing with some sites is to use images rather than
text and to fail to provide text alternatives. This is
particularly poor practice when the images are used as buttons to
provide links. Apart from not meeting minimal accessibility requirements, search
engines don't read images. This practice provides no useful text
for search engines to index.
Ensure that your web site is accessible and
available.
Mind your language!
Obviously search engines are designed to return results for
particular words or phrases. It doesn't matter how hard someone
searches for a particular piece of information, if the words or
phrase they're searching for doesn't occur on your web site or
page, your page will not appear in the search results. It's vital
that you understand your audience or market, the language that
they're likely to use, and craft your content accordingly.
Know your market. Choose your words carefully.
Linking text
Linking text may be the single most important factor in
improving your ranking within Google search results. Linking text
refers to the underlined or highlighted text that constitutes the
link as with "The University of Western Australia" in the example
below:
The University of Western
Australia
Every link to the university home page that Google can find
that contains the words "The University of Western Australia"
improves the ranking of the home page in search engine results
wherever any of those words appear in the search query.
Identify what words or phrases people may be using when
looking for your information, site or page and ensure that you
have links containing those words and phrases pointing to your
site or page.
Popularity or find a friend!
Generally, linking text used within your own website will not
affect your ranking as much as links from other websites. The
more well-phrased links from other sites, i.e. links to your
website from other sites with linking text that contain your
chosen keywords then the better your ranking is likely to be when
people are searching for keywords that occur in that linking
text.
Wherever possible encourage other sites to link to yours
using your preferred linking text.
Titles and headings
Words or phrases that appear in web page titles and headings
may improve the ranking of results for the words or phrases.
Identify what words or phrases people may be using when
looking for your information, site or page and ensure that these
words or phrases appear in page titles and headings.
Proximity of keywords
Some search engines will adjust rankings depending on the
proximity of keywords to each other in a search. When searching
for "university western australia", a page containing the phrase
"The University of Western Australia" may rank higher than a page
that mentions Murdoch University and later on the page includes
an address with the words Western Australia.
Identify what words or phrases people may be using when
looking for your information, site or page and ensure that these
words or phrases appear in close proximity to each other in the
text of your web page.
Metadata
Most major search engines will ignore most metadata. Metadata
was being abused by web developers in attempts to "trick" search
engines to give their web pages higher rankings. The
effectiveness of search algorithms has improved to the point
where useful results search results can often be obtained without
reference to metadata.
However, the campus Intranet search engine weights search
results heavily in favour of pages that have incorporated
effective metadata.
Ensure that all web pages incorporate effective accurate
metadata.
Keywords in web addresses
Some search engines will adjust rankings for a page upwards if
the keyword or words being searched for appear in the actual web
address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the web page. For
example, a web page address including the words "salinity" and
"crisis":
http://www.uwapress.uwa.edu.au/titles/index/salinity_crisis
may appear higher in search engine results than a similar page
that doesn't feature these words in the web address.
Obviously it is important to strike a balance between keeping
web addresses concise and easy to remember and including keywords
where appropriate to improve page rankings in search results.
Include keywords in the web address for pages where
appropriate.
Timing is everything
Search engines are not updated instantaneously. Search engines
"crawl" the internet visiting web sites on a regular basis.
Intervals between visits will vary and may be as short as weeks
or as long as months or even a year or more.
The University uses the free Google University search. Google
crawls the University website updating its index every four to
six weeks. When planning website development, you should ensure
that you allow for the fact that search engines may not update
references to your web site for some time.
Offer your users a site map
Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the
important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100
or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate
pages.
It is easy to create a site map for your site in MySource by
using the
site map template.
SEO or Search Engine Optimisation
Be cautious about consultants, companies or organisations that
offer Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) services. Google has some
useful tips on how to identify an SEO that will improve your
website's ranking rather causing you to be dropped from rankings
altogether.
How does Google work?
As you may imagine, Google's methods are proprietary and
secret. Google would lose any competitive advantage if their
methods were public and anyone could implement them. Also, if
Google's methods were public, unscrupulous web owners would be
better able to develop web sites that would corrupt the Google
search index, directing people using Google to inappropriate
search results.
However, enough is known about Google's methods by examining
the distribution of search results for particular keywords to be
sure that the suggestions above will assist in improving search
engine rankings.
Google PageRank(tm)
One factor used by Google in ranking search results is Page
Rank(tm). If two web pages rank equally with respect
to all the other factors mentioned above, then the page with the
highest PageRank will appear higher in the Google search
results.
The PageRank of a web page appears to be determined by the
number of links to your web page. Google looks at the number of
links to your page as "votes", so the higher the number of links
leading to your web page, the higher your page's PageRank.
"So, if my page has more links to it than another page then it's
bound to appear higher in Google's search results?"
It's not that simple. Links to your page are weighted according
to the PageRank of the page that is linking to yours. So, fewer
links from higher ranked pages are worth more than lots of links
from pages with a low PageRank.
As noted above, links from web pages outside your own website
will also push your PageRank higher than links within your own
website.
Remember that PageRank means nothing if the page in question
doesn't match the search query. It is important to construct your
web site's pages so as to allow Google and indeed any search
engine to optimally index your site to provide relevant search
results for your users.
Questions?
Don't hesitate to contact the ITS Service Desk
for further advice on Search Engine Optimisation.
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