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Getting Your Page Found - Tips on How to Improve Your Page Ranking in Search Engines

Have you ever searched your own web site using a search engine? Is your site well indexed? Is your site easy to find? If you answered no to the above questions, you should adjust and optimize your site to make it more accessible to search engines and the people that arrive at your site from the search engines.

How do search engines work?

Search engines use programs called "spiders" or "crawlers" that visit web sites and index the information on those web sites. It's important to optimize your pages for search engines before you develop your web site. Luckily, you can also perform this task after a site is built, but it will require making changes to your site. If you do make changes to your site, it will likely take more than a month before you see the results of your change. This is due to the fact that it takes time for search engines to update their databases of indexed web sites.

So, how do crawler-based search engines rank and retrieve results, when confronted with hundreds of millions of web pages to sort through? They follow a set of rules, known as an algorithm, which differs from one search engine to another. Below are general tips that apply to most major search engines, including Google.

How do I optimize my pages for search engines?

A query on a crawler-based search engine often returns thousands or even millions of matching web pages. However, as is true with most search engines, only the ten most "relevant" matches are displayed on the first page. How can you ensure that your web site is listed in the "top ten" results? The tips below will help you improve your page ranking on search engines and work towards this goal.

Pick and position your keywords
What keywords would people use to search for your site?  Those words need to appear in your site, otherwise the search engine can't match the user's search to your site.  Come up with 6 to 20 keywords that accurately describe your site.  Two- and three word phrases are okay, and in some case may improve your results! 

The most important place to put keywords is in the Title of your page.  This is the field search engines weigh the heaviest, and should act like a newspaper headline for your page. Use of the Keywords meta tag can also be handy for some search engines (see below).   Other keywords should appear within the first screen's worth of your HTML code (you can select View Page Source in your browser's options to see your HTML as code).  If you have Javascripts or CSS styles, consider putting them in separate files rather than in your HTML code.

Some search engines, like Google, look at the hierarchy of your site's code, as well.  Make sure if you use heading tags, that they appear in numerical order (<h1> comes before <h2> comes before <h3> and so on).

Build links to your pages
Some search engines can't get inside your site to find all your rich content without links to those interior pages.  These links need to be HTML links, rather than links from images, and the link text should be the title of the page linked to.  You can put these links at the bottom of your page if your design calls for image links.  Google recommends you have a static HTML link somewhere for every page in your site.  You might want to build a sitemap page with links to all your pages on it.  If you have more than 100 links, break your sitemap into multiple pages.  You should link to your sitemap from your main page, so that crawlers will find it (and all your other pages) quickly.

It also helps if you can get other sites to link to yours.  Perform a search for the keywords you think should find your site, and look at other websites that already exist and are ranked high with those keywords.  You can ask the site administrator if they will link to you (if they are in direct competition with you, don't expect anything, but it never hurts to ask).  These links from other, high-ranked sites will help improve your ranking.

Avoid search engine spamming
Nobody likes spam.  This includes search engines.  If you get caught up in schemes to improve your page ranking through spamming, chances are your site will be down-ranked, or possibly even dropped from the search engines index altogether.  The content of your site, both displayed text and metadata, should be enough for users to find your site when they're searching for it.  Focus on accurately representing your unique content, rather than trying to 'outwit' the search engines.

Add meta tags
You can add information about the nature of your site without putting it into the part your users see by the use of meta tags.  These tags are placed within the head of an HTML document, and take the form <meta name="Type of Metadata" content="What that Metadata is" />.  Below are the most common meta tags and their usage.

  • Title:
    Sample code: <title> Welcome to the University of Rhode Island </title>
    While the Title tag is not strictly a ‘meta’ tag per se, it is the single most important piece of information you can provide about your page.  Search engines look at the title element heavily in their ranking algorithms, and users utilize it to judge whether a specific page is relevant to their search or not.

    You should always create concise, descriptive and meaningful titles for your pages. Google and other search engines down-rank for very long titles, as they are deemed an attempt to artificially inflate page ranks.  Do not use generic names like “Homepage”.  If you want to put your department’s name or acronym in every title, put it at the end.  Think of this like a newspaper headline for your page; it should quickly and accurately summarize the content of the page.
  • Description:
    Sample code: <meta name="description" content="A brief and accurate description of this page or site" />
    The Description meta tag allows page authors to add concise (200 characters or less) summary of their pages.  Most major search engines keep track of this, and Google will display this text in its search results list. This is a good place to include more keyword phrases that won't necessarily fit in the Title field, but make sense in a brief descriptive paragraph.
  • Keywords:
    Sample code: <meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keywords, keyword2, keyword-phrase" />
    Google and other major search engines no longer look at this tag, since it can be easily abused by spammers to increase page ranking by adding lots of junk keywords or repeating the same keyword numerous times.  While the major search engines do not use keywords anymore, older or smaller search engines may still.  Adding them to your site costs a small investment in time, and might increase your ranking on some search engines.

    The key is NOT to repeat a keyword too many times or your site will be down-ranked by the major search engines. It's a good idea to restrict your keyword list to fewer than 20 keywords.
  • Robots:
    Sample code: <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow, noarchive, nosnippet" />
    If you do not want your page to be crawled by search engines, you can add use this meta tag.
    • Adding ‘noindex’ in the content area prevents the page from being added to the search engines listings. 
    • Adding ‘nofollow’ prevents the web crawler from following any of the links on the page. 
    • Adding ‘noarchive’ keeps the page from being archived by the search engine (removes the ‘cached’ link from a Google search result). 
    • Adding ‘nosnippet’ is used by Google to indicate that you don’t want a snippet of your page to be displayed under the title.  You can use any combination of the above options

    Sample code: <span class="robots-nocontent">This text isn’t crawled</span>
    If you want your page to be indexed by a search engine, but believe that some of the content may be misleading (a quote that could be easily taken out of context) to the search engine's page ranking algorithm, you can enclose that information in a tag with the class "robots-nocontent".  Search engines will then no longer use that span of text to index and analyze your page.  You do not need to have an associated CSS styling for this class.

Adding meta tags to the URI Web templates:

The University of Rhode Island has recently launched a set of templates to allow beginners and experienced designers alike to build professional quality web sites faster and easier.  These templates will help to provide a consistent look and image and serve to further connect all of the constituencies to the University.  You can download them at http://www.uri.edu/home/templates/index.html.  They are available both for Macromedia Dreamweaver and in plain HTML.

Please follow instructions at http://www.uri.edu/home/templates/instructions/ to add meta tags (including title and description and keyword meta tag) to your Web templates.

Related resources and links

For more information on search engine optimization, please visit the following sites: