Writing to Be Found: Guidelines for Writing for Search Engines

Writing Effectively for Search Engines

Google is the most popular and effective search engine currently in use. One of the great strengths of Google is that it rewards web pages that follow W3C guidelines, follow web standards and offer useful content.

How Google Works

Googlebots

Google runs programs, called Googlebots, which crawl the web constantly and harvest web pages for the eventual input into the main Google database.

Googlebots "read" a webpage much like we do, so clean, efficiently-coded HTML pages are rewarded.

Googlebots arrive slowly, one or two at first. Then they return the next day, eight or nine of them, and each Googlebot visits four to eight pages each. They keep returning for a week or so, and then they vanish. New pages are finally indexed into the Google database every months or so.

After Google starts indexing new information from your site into the main database, it takes about a week for Google to copy this information across all their thousands of machines.

Tips, Guidelines and Best Practices

Google Likes Text

That may seem obvious, but some people get confused when their "Photo Album" (featuring nothing but photographs, navigation icons made from images without alt tags, and no text) isn't well ranked.

After all, how can Google know your page is about "cats" when you never actually use the word "cat" in plain text on the page?

This tip cannot be over-stated. Sites exist only through Flash or other multimedia schemes whose output is not parsed by the Googlebot at all.

Google Likes Formatting

Google likes structured and semantically rich documents.

How does Google tell whether your page is about leprechauns versus just making a passing reference to leprechauns? It's easy when you build a structured document.

Through building a structured document, the Googlebot attempts to rank the importance of a given keyword. For instance, a keyword echoed in H1 or H2 headline text or boldface type is taken to be a more primary subject than one merely mentioned in the body text (though the number of occurances in the body text is relevant as well).

This looks like:

<h2>Most important information in a subheading</h2>
<p>My content</p>
<h3>Second most important information in a subheading</h3>
<p>More content</p>

Google Likes Freshness

Google is like everyone else on the web: it likes new, up-to-date content.

The Google Freshbot indexes select portions of the web on a daily or weekly rather than monthly basis. It is attracted to blog-like and/or newsfeed-like features. So, update your site often with topical, contemporary information that your audience values.

Google Likes Accessibility

Google has respect for all browsers, and thus feels more warmly about pages that can be parsed by any browser, no matter how humble, rather than cryptic pages that require the latest and greatest browser bristling with bleeding-edge plug-ins in order to work.

Google looks for well-crafted and semantically valid HTML, like internal anchor names related to sub-topics, subject headlines, text justification and paragraph size to help determine the kind of content a page contains. Google gets mad if you snub the blind man using Lynx, because that's evil.

Google Likes Outbound Hyperlinks

Linking to similarly themed sites that Google already respects adds a layer of sugar to your content. Google is happy that you have contributed your grey matter to culling the content of the Internet, and rewards you with a certain amount of good faith that you know what you're talking about, and are not linking random, stupid things.

Google Loves Inbound Hyperlinks

Being linked to by a respected site (in this context a site with a high PageRank) is the single best way to boost your listing.

Being linked to from sites themed with related keywords amplifies this effect, especially when the anchoring link text itself contains relevant keywords (for example "cool kitten adoption site" rather than the infamous "click here ").

Googlebot Isn't Psychic, So Remember to Link Your Pages

Other than coming in the front door (to your HTML root directory, usually something like:

http://www.plattsburgh.edu/yourdirectory/index.php

Googlebots can only follow links that you provide to it. If you have pages that aren't linked to from anywhere else on your site (called "orphan" pages) they won't get spidered by Google or by anyone else for that matter. So, always remember to connect your pages together.

Location, Location, Location

Google likes you to tell it where you are. It thinks city names are delicious. This has the additional benefit of allowing you to talk about the benefits that our location offers to students.

Google Likes Experts

Who better to write about the stenghts of your program and the opportunities of your program that you? You are the experts.