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It’s all in the planning (7)

More on search engine optimisation – or how to get more visitors to your site.

From the previous instalment of this series, you’ll have learned that there’s a lot of thought needs to go into how you present your pages to search engines in order to optimise the chances of them sending you any visitors. While it’s eminently possible to had code keywords and meta tags into a smallish site with a small number of HTML documents on it, once your Web site grows beyond this size, then you’re looking at a job that can become very onerous indeed.

Fortunately, there are ways and means of reducing what can be a chore into a semi-automatic task. The primary method is the use of templates.

Sections

If you delve right back to the beginning of this series, you’ll see that I advised you to break down your site into sections, inside each of which every document would be strongly related. That’s pretty much what we do on Practical PC. It is structured into fairly tightly defined sections, each of which contains further sub-sections. Thus, we have:

Guides

Reviews

Web-building

Downloads  and

Opinion

As our major sections, each of which (with the exception of Opinion and Downloads) has further sub-sections. Taking our Computing Guides section, it breaks down as follows:

Guides

–Comms

            -Digital Cameras

            -Graphics

            -How Do I…?

            -Networking

            -Peripherals

            -Printers and Printing

            -Sound

            -Storage

            -What is it?

            -Where can I find…?

            -Windows

As you can see, each sub-section is pretty tightly defined. So, it’s fairly easy to create a template page for each sub-section which carries a set of keywords that is likely to accurately describe the documents held in each section.

What gets changed for each page or document is its title – we try always to put its section – in this case “Practical PC Guides” and then a descriptive element, like “How do I guard against Viruses” or “Digital Camera Lenses Explained” or “Perfect Printing” plus any instalment number in the form “part 4”.

Given that most search engines give a goodly chunk of weight to the document title, you need to be descriptively accurate. If the title is taken together with a keyword list that echoes the aim of the sub-section, and those keywords also are used in the body of the text, then your page will rank much higher in a search engine’s results.

I’ve also discovered that the standfirst, or teaser, that you see just below the article title (on this page that’s “More on search engine optimisation – or how to get more visitors to your site.”) also appears in most search engines that post a précis of the page, so it’s a good idea to write a descriptive one that holds some of the most important keywords for the article in question.

Sorting Keywords

The hard part is actually deciding what your keywords are. Fear not, as I mentioned last time, there are tools available to help you get the list sorted. One of my personal favourites is TagGen which you can download via this link. It scans your page and creates a list of keywords for you – useful for setting up the templates for your site. There’s also SiteTagger, which does a similar job, a trial version of which can be downloaded here. Finally in the list is J-Bots MetaTag Maker 2002, a trial of which you can get here.

No doubt there are others, but these three work well, and should be on your list of software to try.

The bottom line is that by using tools such as these, you can match your page title to your keyword list and your body text – which means that you will achieve higher rankings on most search engines for search terms that are pertinent to your page.

Next time, we’ll look at how to go about submitting your pages to search engines, and how to achieve better rankings by link…

Read part eight