Just Be
Relevant
by TDavid :: TDScripts.com
Lord knows I'm no search engine guy, so writing an
article about search engines seems a little awkward to me. However, I can speak
about the technical side of engines because in scripting I've written
algorithms and I understand from a technical standpoint what these algorithms
are created to do. So I offer this article to you not as a webmaster who has
the inside track on the engines, but as a programmer who understands the
technical side of what some search algorithms have been designed to look
for.
Just be relevant.
It's not original saying that, I
realize, but IMHO it will be far more effective than "wanting to look
relevant."
It's really pretty simple. You write a webpage and on that
page it has pictures of adults engaged in a certain activity. You then can
structure your meta tag description and meta keywords describing those acts.
Even better if you put text around those pictures describing what is in those
pictures, or at least summarizing it like you might do in the image ALT
tags.
I've seen people say use all the allowed words
and keywords available to you. A programmer could write one line in as a
"penalty clause" which would lower a site's ranking for excessive verbage or
repeating of keywords or phrases. I'm not saying such clauses exist (sure they
do), but if I wanted to cut down on spam in my perfect search engine (nothing's
perfect of course), I would do just that. It's as easy as:
Now we rank according
to the eqauation:
relevancy - penality = overall score.
Therefore
your page might be super relevant but because you overused words and/or phrases
you find yourself penalized and thus LESS relevant. It's one rather easy way to
catch the relevant from the spam.
So is lesser better? Not necessarily.
I would recommend creating the meta tags and descriptions to do exactly what
they were designed to do: summarily describe the content of the page. No more,
no less. I made a search engine for my site php-scripts.com that works entirely
off the meta tags and does not consider the content of the page in determining
the relevancy. It was an important lesson for me to make relevant pages -- not
only because I wanted to attract major search engine spiders, but because I
wanted my internal web to be able to allow useful relevant searches for people
looking through my diary entries for scripting help. Spamming my own search
engine would clearly have served no useful purpose for my site visitors. Sure,
I could put "free scripts" on every page, but there aren't free scripts on
every page. There are example scripts on almost every page, and they are able
to be freely used, but it's not the same as someone looking for "free scripts".
Let's look at one of my pages as an example:
php-scripts.com/php_diary/030301.php3
Essentially
this page is diary-style answer to a question of how to install php scripts.
There is no instructive code on this page, but there are references to useful
resources. Now if I goto a search engine this page doesn't rank very well
(yet). But give it a few months and it might. The spiders will like this page
because it is relevant and not intentionally so. Interestingly (at the time
this article was written) if you type "how to install php scripts" into the
google search engine you'll get the tdscripts main page as a top 10 listing out
of 66,000 entries. The only thing we have on that page is that we install third
party scripts, so it isn't exactly matching the query -- but it is matching the
words "install php scripts". So the algorithms don't always catch the intention
of the page unless you help them. By "help", I do not mean spam, I mean the
best possible summary of the page using the meta tags and description and the
text in your page to relate to the keywords. In google, you can click the
"cache" and see what the search engine saw and how it ranked the page.
Before we go back to the example click on the "similar pages" link in the
google engine next to the TD Scripts top listing. These are pages that the
spider jumped from to find TD Scripts. If you find a good page that is relevant
to a set of keywords, you want to trade traffic or at least put up a link to
that page. You may think, why should I give away traffic to this page? The
answer is: you will increase your relevancy in some algorithms. For instance, I
want to see how many pages are linking to the page above. If a lot of pages
are, then it must match the search criteria better than others. I am going to
coin this process as a reverse penalty:
In the above, $x could
equal a variable defined by the search engine programmers. Maybe it is 50 urls
or 500, whatever the number is, if you have that many pages linking to it, the
relevancy will increase. So by having a lot of sites link to a page it tells
the engine that it must be more relevant. Therefore you should try to find
links that you can offer that are relevant to your page and offer them to your
surfers. In some algorithms this can improve your position. From the webmaster
side, I suppose this is like saying: "if my store doesn't have the brand of
cheese you are looking for, this store does ... or might." You are helping out
the surfer and you are becoming more relevant in the engines, talk about a
win-win situation.
Now, let's look at this article I've just written
above and try to make the meta tags for this article. I created a script to
help us surf through the words and look for how many times words appear. This
script is quite useful when it comes down to actually building your meta tags
and descriptions. You can use the script any time you'd like at:
tdscripts.com/webmaster_utilities/show_words.html
Now
I'll run this script and see what most the searchable words are and the number
of times they appear in this article for 3 or more appearances in the
document:
You may note if you
run the script that there are a lot of words which could be parsed out like
"and", "the", "to", "and", etc -- these words are ignored by search engines and
thus we might want to ignore them in our meta-keywords, but they can be useful
in creating a description.
I've demonstrated how you can use this tool to help you build
more relevant meta description and keyword tags which actually relate to the
content on the page. Over time this should help to improve the search engine
rankings that you receive for your web pages.
TDavid is co-owner, programmer and webmaster for several
sites devoted to programming including his own
tdscripts.com. He has
done custom programming in various programming languages for companies all over
the world. Every Friday at 2pm PST you can catch his weekly radio show
dedicated to the technical side of webmastering and programming at
www.scriptschool.com/radio
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