toucheatout  2006-03-26 17:29  Web  

To ensure good impact, those more or less unseenable parameters matter (i mean their absence could be seen as a sign). They can simply be seen as accessible webdesign. Do not abuse and express clearly and honestly what you are talking about, otherwise you could get to be blacklisted and irritate those that could have used those infos.

Generic recommandations for a website

Note: The importance of keywords and other meta tags seems to be getting less and less considered, due to the heavy abuse they have been subjected to. Do not overuse them, since at best there is no real gain, and at worst they hint for a possible search-engine-spamming site. They don't hurt neither, and some older engines still rely on them.

Meta Keywords

Those summarize the main topics of the page. Preferrably changed for each page. Not as important as before.

Meta description

Same purpose as keywords or title, sentences in english and possibly longer than the title (< 255 chars).

Systematically use an alt="" parameter in the img tag

It is respect to persons that cannot see them (vision-impaired, text browsers and search engines). If not present, there is an unqualifiable void for those.

robots.txt file

Even empty, this file reserved for robots is a sign you thought about it. Checked by every spider, it can be used to deny access/indexing of parts of the site or reject well-known harvester robots.

Titles

They should complement the keywords, and vary for each page. Description in one sentence (< 100 chars) of the page.

Nice urls

Search engines (and humans) prefer to understand what they see, and take into account keywords in the URL, so either create nice urls by design or make use of the RewriteRule in apache (see Sample nice rewriting). You also can consult a good reference on the details at WebRankInfo and similar resources.

Refresh or augment your content regularly

This show search engines and visitors that it is worth coming back to see, that the site is living.

Use your keywords wisely

That is to say, write your texts for people, with focus and value in your content. Try to "highlight" the keywords in titles (page title and h1, ..., h6), in external links pointing to your page, in alt="" parameters for images. First words of the first paragraph seem to have more weight as well. Still the most important is making semantically correct sentences. Nonsense just to get a better rank has no future in the internet (well, I hope so...).

Avoid javascript & flash

Those are not interpreted by search engines nor text browsers (picture yourself a search engine as a blind person, that is with a text-mode web browser view.
If you can't install the lynx browser, visit for instance this lynxviewer page to get a feeling of how yours can be seen text-wise.).