Websites - search engine optimisation
Mar 2 2006 23:14
Following some of the posts on the "what do you think of the AF?" thread, a few people have asked about web design and search engines. Thought it'd be an idea to start this thread about search engine optimisation (SEO) to get a discussion going on how to use these things. I'm by no means an expert at this, but I'll answer what questions I can.
John. wrote:
nastyned wrote:
Yes, it's just i still can't get my head round it as a the AF site is all libcom.org web addresses anyway.
It's all to do with how stuff's categorised. Content on our site is arranged better - for example by topic (say, history), then type of article (say, individual biography), then by name (say, Matiushenko) - rather then the AF site which would have Matiushenko's bio hidden away within one particular issue of Organise.
How articles are tagged and named is also important for google...
For example:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=matiushenko&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
another example of this working well is: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=belfast+postal+strike
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=belfast+wildcat
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=belfast+post+strike
If you look at the information google displays for those searches, you can see the search terms appear in three key places.
1. The title. this is generated from the page's <title> tag.
in terms of SEO "libcom.org/history" is a bit surplus - just the name and dates are all people will really search for, but there aren't many matiushenkos around, and you shouldn't change page design purely to suit search engines because they don't actually "see" it.
2. The description of the page. Google picks this up from the <description> meta-tag, and sometimes from the main body of the page.
3. the url - self explanatory
A term only needs to appear in one of these for google to find it, but to get near the top of the listings, it should appear in at least two where possible. Keywords are barely used by any search engines now as far as I know.
However, there's some things to bear in mind.
1. having too many different words in a title or url waters down the relevance of any search term. So if you insist on having really long titles you won't get high up for relevant searches, but you might end up on page three for more searches.
2. Having an important word appear two or three times in the body of the text is worth doing (and especially as "title" tags on photos where it isn't obvious), but doing things like have a word 20 times in white 1px high text is penalised by some search engines after people did loads of stuff like that to spam them.
There are some other things which determine google listings. One is google page rank - google's assessment of the importance of a web-page. This is based on the number and rank of other pages that link to it. so if you have several links to your website from the BBC and wikipedia, you'll get a good page rank, if you have loads of links from link-spam depositories, this can adversely affect your page rank.
If a dozen pages have similar formatting to the history example above, google will order them according to the rank of the page in most cases.
Another thing is google looks at the words which are used to link to the page it's indexing. so http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=failure links to the biography of George W. Bush. This is because a lot of people linked to that page like this:
failure and enough links like that will skew the google results.[/url]
Mar 3 2006 13:42
#2
nastyned wrote:
cheers, I still don't get the way google looks at how things are archieved though.
Do you mean what I was talking about - the way things are arranged on the site? That wasn't to do with google, it was to do with how people look for things.
Mar 3 2006 14:08
#3
DOH!
Mar 3 2006 17:20
#4
Could you please post some examples of meta tags and descriptions so that I can cut and paste (with some editing).
Mar 3 2006 19:26
#5
If you're using firefox, you can view the source for any page (which is useful for lots of things).
Here they are for the history article john mentioned:
<title>Afanasy Nikolaevich Matiushenko, 1879-1907 - libcom.org/history | peopleshistory.co.uk</title> <meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="A short biography of Afanasy Nikolaevich Matiushenko, 1879-1907, the Potemkin mutineer - a people's history article">
Mar 3 2006 19:30
#6
and from a /news article which was automatically generated by geeklog:
<title>libcom.org - Irish Ferries dispute roundup</title>
Mar 4 2006 23:36
#7
nastyned wrote:
cheers, I still don't get the way google looks at how things are archieved though.
Although John wasn't talking about google, having lots of different articles on one page, rather than seperate ones doesn't help with search engines at all.
Mar 5 2006 06:06
#8
It does if you link them to each other doesn't it?
Mar 5 2006 08:59
#9
Jef Costello wrote:
It does if you link them to each other doesn't it?
If you have a long list of links to articles that helps. But having say ten articles on top of each other with all the text - google's much happier with one per page and an index usually.
Mar 6 2006 11:56
#10
Meta tag analyser - useful online tool
You can type your URL into this and check for meta tag errors and other tips:
http://www.widexl.com/remote/search-engines/metatag-analyzer.html
Mar 6 2006 12:13
#11
AF gets a great hit for 'anarchist' on google...
and once you get there there's a link to libcom on every index page
plus a direct link from the AF homepage, news page and links page. 
Just a mention that the Potemkin/Matiushenko example mentioned in the previous thread did not get a AF website hit as it wasn't online on the AF site (at least not in HTML). This is now corrected - try google in a week or so!
As far as I understand it meta description tags are mostly ignored by google/scroogle (although not by all other search engines). In general if you have decent 'title' tag and text (and 'alt' tags on your images) you won't have to worry spending time creating extra meta tags?? AF gets top google hits for anarchism UK/Britain, and we even get in top 5 of 'communism UK' by careful choice of words on the homepage.
Lastly, good news for smaller sites. whilst searching is overtaking browsing as the primary means for accessing the web, focussed searches still turn up decent hits (if you have used decent indexing terms in titles and text etc., that is):
Googlearchy or Googlocracy? http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/feb06/2787
cheers, I still don't get the way google looks at how things are archieved though.