| Designing
for Search Engines
This
information will prove to be a little frustrating, as it sometimes
flies in the face of contemporary web design. It is, however,
very much in keeping with the principles of usability.
While
each search engine -- whether searching a local server or web-wide
-- is different, there are many things you can do to enhance
the likelihood of having your content found.
Make
use of these techniques:
-
Have
a good description of the goals/content of the page in the
first paragraph. Many search engines will search only the
first paragraph or the first xxx words of the page text.
-
Think
about your audience -- both the ones who are insiders and
understand the terminology to be used, and those who are
unfamiliar with the names of specific offices at Wellesley
or the language of your discipline. Find ways of speaking
to your entire audience so that they can find the term they
know via the search engine.
-
Avoid
the excessive use of common words; unique terms will
assist the searcher to reach your page faster. If a page
has a lot
of incidences of "education", "school" and "women",
it will be harder to find on our local search engines
since everyone here uses those words. People become
frustrated
when they can't find any unique terms to assist in
narrowing down the search results.
-
Use
clear navigational links throughout you site so that a spider
which is crawling from link to link for indexing purposes
will find things readily. Keeps these links up to date as
you revise pages.
-
Use
invisible "meta" tags to
augment the language in your text
-
Whenever
you include a graphic [whether a picture or a text graphic],
describe it with an alt
tag.
-
Be
sure to use a descriptive and unique title
tag for each page. This is the information seen at
the very top of your browser window, which usually prints
out along with the URL when you print a page. Most search
engines post this title in the results and regard it as important
when assigning relevancy for display purposes.
Examples
of bad titles:
Untitled (this
default title appears when you fail to set a title)
socsci (an acronym with no meaning to anyone)
page 1 (of what?)
Examples
of helpful titles:
Political
Science 842: Antarctic Base Politics
Admission: Contacts
Folk Song Club: How to Join
Avoid
these practices:
-
Writing
in frames. Most search engines cannot follow links for frames,
thus the content is lost to indexing.
-
Scripting.
[This one is really hard to swallow, so just be aware.] Scripts
cause some search engine spiders to stop indexing. On our
local SWISH-E search engine, the indexing is done, but sometimes
the script displays where the initial text of the page would
display in the results.
-
Setting
text in graphics without providing alt
tags. If, for design control, you create the
entire page as a series of images, there will be nothing
for a search engine to index, except for the required
page dogtag.
-
Writing
without unique terms.
-
Failing
to create a page title using the <title> tag.
-
Forgetting
to use alt
tags to describe images.
-
Situating
your content way down in a series of folders within folders.
This URL is unlikely to enhance your chances of being found
by a search engine:
www.wellesley.edu/Folder1/Subfolder1/SubSubfolder1/file.html
The deeper your content, the less likely that an external search engine's
spider will find your information. The other down side to this practice
is that your URL or address will be very long.
-
Tricking
the search engine by repeating the same text over and over
in meta tags or invisible text. Don't! Most
external search engines can detect this tactic and may block
your content from being indexed.
-
Forgetting
to remove old pages on our server. A search engine may find
them and may provide outdated information to unsuspecting
search engine users.
What
may not be indexed:
-
Frames
sites and scripting in Javascript or Java applets are often
not indexed.
-
Files
made up solely of graphics or Flash animations
-
Most
search engines will not index every word [other than stopwords]
on your site. They may only record the first paragraph or
the first hundred words, for example
-
Content
which is locally restricted via passwording, a "local
only" protection, or other means.
-
Most
search engines cannot index the content of PDF files because
they aren't HTML text. Google can index PDF files.
-
XML
code may preclude indexing until the standard is more widely
adopted.
-
Images,
audio and video files
-
Text
created as graphics [though if you assign an alt
tag to it, that tag may be indexed.
Comprehensiveness
of indexing:
-
Many
search engines do not index every word or page.
-
Pages
which are not linked to other pages will seldom be indexed.
However, this is not a reason to fail to remove old
pages. Old pages are found via old links, and search engines
that fully index a server's content will also turn them up.
Housekeeping is almost always a virtue...
A
note about timeliness of indexing:
-
Our
local SWISH-E search engine is fully reindexed early every
Saturday morning.
-
The
local Google search engine results from a spider which crawls
the site approximately monthly, jumpinf rom link to link.
-
External
search engines have spiders which crawl the world wide web
on an average of every month or two.
Registering
your site with search engines:
Registering
with external search engines is worthwhile
if you want to be found by folks searching quickly after you
put the site up. This is important for new or revised web sites
which have time-sensitive information.
While
several commercial firms provide registration services, they
typically suggest that you need to be registered at hundreds
of search engines. You do not! You can register
for free at the most important search engines yourself -- perhaps
10 in all -- to good effect. An opportunity for registration
is often found on the search engine's homepage.
Similarly,
send your URL to the webmasters of a few important pages linking
to sites similar to yours, or to a few Internet directory sites
such as Yahoo. For ideas, see important search engines/indexes/directories
listed on the Library's
Search the Web page.
We
recommend that you do not pay a fee to a search engine resource
for preferred placement in that same resource.
Any
questions? For help in diagnosing your placement in search
engine results or for assistance with automated link checking,
contact webmaster@wellesley.edu.
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