Things to Avoid in Page Design
Keyword Repetition
Avoid repeating a keyword more than 6 to 7 times on a page. If you're having trouble getting a page ranked well, double check that you didn't accidentally overload the search word in the page too many times.
Linking Back
Always include a link back to your home page and the previous page that led the visitor to the current page. If you don't, the search engine spiders may jump to a lower level page in your site but will be unable able to return back to the home page for further traversing down your web tree.
Opening Lines Within the Page Most search engines will display the opening lines of text from your page in its listings. The search engine user will then scan these lines to determine if the page is relevant to what they're looking for. Even if you have the keywords in there, you also need to say something to encourage the user to click on your site over the others listed. Try to describe as clearly as possible the purpose of that page in those opening lines. If not, your page may rank well, but no one will be interested in visiting it.
Dealing with Frames
The use of frames in a web site can make design and navigation (of the overall site) easier.
But theycan cause problems with your web site's rankings in the search engines for two reasons:
- Half of the search engines cannot read the content contained
in frames.
- Frames increase the file size, the number of total words
that make up the web page, and therefor dilutes the keyword relevancy.
The search engines that are not "frame" capable view the page just
as if you were viewing your site with an early vintage browser.
This is evidenced by the large number of search engines that
return listings that look like this:
go-karts.com
is your store for go-karts and go-kart parts. This
web page uses frames; You'll need Netscape or
IE 2.0 or better to view them. 97%
http://www.go-karts.com/ (Size 1.1K)
What is going on?
The search engine's spider simply couldn't read frame pages.
Therefore, it only read the contents of the <NOFRAMES> tag
- and it wasn't very compelling. This information is returned
to browsers that are not frames capable.
Unfortunately, the text in the <NOFRAMES>
tag is often instructions to the reader that they require a frames
capable browser to view the site properly.
So, how do you avoid this nasty little problem?
Simply be sure that
your page can be indexed by the major search engine's spiders.
This can be accomplished by diligently using the <NOFRAMES>
tag. You do this by creating an alternate web
page within the <NOFRAMES> tag such that search engines have
something to index. Compose a complete HTML Web page between
the <NOFRAMES> and the </NOFRAMES> tags.
Also, you should include the NOFRAMES tag immediately below the very
first frameset tag, because you want the keyword
rich text to appear as close to the top of the page as possible.
An example:
<FRAMESET COLS="350,*" border="0">
<NOFRAMES>
<BODY>
<H1>Header full of keywords</H1>
<P>
Put you basic web site text that would be used
if you were not using frames in here. Also include
links like the one below. Spiders like those too.
</P>
<A HREF="http://www.yourcompany.com/anotherpage.html">
Click Here for More Info</A>
<P>
You should put in as much relevent text as possible.
Make the page rich with information (even though no
one but the spiders will ever see it).
</BODY>
</NOFRAMES>
<FRAME SRC="html/menu.htm" NAME="menuframe"
MARGINWIDTH=3 SCROLLING=NO NORESIZE>
<FRAME SRC="html/main.html" NAME="mainframe" SCROLLING=YES>
</frameset>
The best method to designing the page is to include all of the
information that is used in the other framed pages
in the <NOFRAMES> tag section of this page.
Also include any links to other pages in your site
so that the search engine can traverse
to those pages and index them as well.
Make sure that the <NOFRAMES> tag follows the
<FRAMESET> tag.
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