Web Administration: Web Resources
Tutorials
Optimizing for Users and Search Engines
As search engines have improved, our reliance on them has grown. While not a hard and fast rule, traffic is progressively driven more by search than by traditional clickstreams. As such, for Web users to find information, it must be presented in a manner parseable by search engines.
While search engines vary, Google is the one spoken of here by default. Given Google’s popularity, it makes sense to look at PageRank. Google returns search results in a sorted order. PageRank is a proprietary numerical value that Google assigns to each page on the Web. The value of the PageRank for a given site determines the position in the sorted order where a particular page will be listed.
PageRank
Google explains PageRank in this way:
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
When someone uses Google to search for a Web page, PageRank is used as a barometer of a page’s importance.
Keywords
In Search Engine Visibility, Shari Thurow explains “For your target audience to find your site on the search engines, your web pages must contain keyword phrases that match the phrases your target audience is typing into search queries.”
The most important places for keyword phrases are:
- The title of the page – what the author calls a page
- Text of incoming links – what others are calling a page
- Headers (
h1,h2, etc.) within the page – the basic structure of a page - Text in the page – the page’s content
Meta Tags
A common misconception is that meta tags (e.g., keywords and descriptions) improve rankings within search engines. While many spiders crawl meta tags and many search sites use that information in the results (the description below page titles in Google results, for example), they do not affect ranking. Generally, search engines are more concerned with what is actually on a page than with what the person who makes the page says is on it.
Search Engines and Accessibility
Improving the accessibility of your page will improve the odds that your page will be presented at the top of the search results list. “Google is like a blind person” is a common simile—and for good measure. Many of the issues that might make a page difficult for someone with a visual impairment (images without alt descriptions, improper usage of frames, poor document structure, etc.), also make a page difficult to index correctly.
Suggested Reading
- Web Basics of search engine optimisation
- High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization
- The Ultimate SEO Checklist
- PageRank
- UF Web Accessibility Guidelines
- Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville
- Search Engine Visibility by Shari Thurow
Tips
- Does the title of your page contain the key words that you would like to match? For example, if your page title is “Office Information” it will not be listed highly in a search for “biology of fishes.”
- Does your content contain the key words you expect to match? Are these words near the top of the page? Are they headers? Words higher on the page and within header tags have more weight in searches.
- Does your site have any external links? Web Administration provides a link registration service for UF sites.
- If your site was previously located at another address, are there permanant redirects from the old pages to the new ones?
- Did you change your page recently? As a rule of thumb, it can take up to two weeks for changes to be noticed by search engines.