For Southwark News the Atia Web Management System has been used to present a content rich site that mirrors where possible the look and feel of the Southwark News newspaper. The content managment system had to be robust enough to cope with a fast and frequent upload of content being put onto the site every week by journalists and advertisers.

www.southwarknews.co.uk

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation or SEO will be extinct very soon. Whilst Meta Tags and external links were heavily used in the past to rank a page's relevance within a search engine, meta tags are now not used greatly due to the system's misuse in the past.  Read on to discover the benefits and pitfalls of the most popular SEO techniques and we will attempt to clarify the techniques preferred by the most popular search engines.

Popular SEO Techniques

Optimising Meta Tags

When the HTML language was first created, it was recognised that new tags would later be needed for specialised purposes. Since there wasn't any way to anticipate every possible need, the meta tag was created as a sort of "catch-all." These tags allow Webmasters to issue an unlimited variety of commands, or to provide information to a browser, search engine, or automated program (i.e., robot). The tags are ignored by default unless the browser or search engine specifically recognises them.

Meta tags are contained in the HEAD section near the top of the page. They're not displayed to the end user unless you view the source code of the page. The two most common meta tags, are keyword and description tags. The meta keyword tag is designed to tell the search engines what keywords are important to your page, and thereby how people should be able to find you when they search.

Although you can list as many keywords as you like, most search engines will not read more than about 1000 characters. Including your most important keywords at the start of the tag is very important.

The meta description tag is primarily used for telling the search engine what description you want associated to the page in the search engine's results.  It's essential that you create a compelling description for your page to entice people to click through from the search results.  Each engine that supports the meta description tag will truncate it down to 150 to 400 characters depending on the engine. Therefore, include the best portion of your description in the first 150 characters, but go ahead and add additional sentences to fill it out to about 400 characters.

It doesn't matter what order the tags are placed in the HEAD area, although it's recommended that you include the TITLE tag first on the page, before listing any other tags.

Unfortunately, the majority of the major search engines do not recognise the meta keyword tag at all. A larger number do recognise the meta description tag for the purpose of creating a summary for the page. The prevailing philosophy is that search engines prefer to index text that is clearly visible to the user, although exceptions are certainly made. The engines in general consider invisible text, such as that found in meta tags, as "untrustworthy" since they can be easily abused by an unethical Webmaster. For example, someone could list out many keywords that do not apply to their page's content, or they could repeat a keyword many times in hopes of boosting their rankings.

Of the engines that do support meta tags, none are thought to give extra relevance to words appearing in meta tags versus elsewhere on the page. In fact, most engines give words in these tags less weight than if they had appeared elsewhere on the page such as in the body area or the page title.

A conclusion could be drawn that meta tags are useless but it is definitely recommended that a website include a meta description tag on every page to avoid the search engine making up its own description from random excerpts on the page.

In regard to the meta keyword tag, many experts believe that including a keyword in both your meta tags and in other areas of your page can help improve rankings. For example, let's say your keyword was "Property in Goa" and it appeared in the body text that is visible to the user. If the keyword were also included in your meta keyword tag, then that would reinforce to the search engine that "Property in Goa" was an important theme on this page. Although no extra relevancy is given for including the keyword solely in the meta tag, some engines may look to the meta tag as a way to reinforce their belief that a page is relevant if all the other more important factors are present and correct too.

Despite this, including the tags are unlikely to hurt your rankings if the following simple rules are met. Repeating the same keyword more than two or three times in the tag and repeating the same word twice in a row may trigger a search engine's "spam filter." This also applies to including keywords that do not apply to the content of that page.

Pages predominantly displaying Flash, whose code does not contain meta tags, can have difficulty in gaining the higher positioning in search results that similar sites built in HTML may gain. There is usually less text written on a page containing flash and many search engines are unable to read the media files which are displayed. New software is beginning to be introduced for both search engine optimisation and web analytics, but these are still very basic and the majority of media files are still unreadable to these types of software.

Unique Search Terms

The most ideal way of getting higher page rankings is to gear a site towards a unique search term. An example of this is, Properties in Orlando Florida and Properties in Goa. The first search term is a popular one because Orlando is home to the very popular Disney World and the holiday property market is very strong there. Sites wishing to introduce this service to the public will have to compete with a large number of other sites who are providing a similar service. Properties in Goa has proved to be a popular search term because much fewer competitors exist within this market. Goa is a less popular destination and therefore submitting your site engineered toward this search term will result in a higher page ranking.

External Link Counting and External Link Weighting

Quantifying the importance of a site's incoming links from external sources is still quite a popular way of ranking a website's importance and therefore how high they appear in the results of a relevant query. e.g. news.bbc.co.uk is an important news site because lots of sites link to it. This also means that the BBC's links to other pages are held in higher esteem and therefore have an increased standing when counting the links the BBC has to another site. This helps make other pages important.

Avoiding Being Blacklisted

The techniques listed below will, if used, almost certainly guarantee that Google, Yahoo and other popular search engines will black list sites caught using them.

Useless Link Exchanges

In the early days of SEO, scouting other websites that were related to your own, and agreeing to swap links to help boost your link popularity, was an easy way to improve search result rankings.  Now, the search engines give negative page rankings on certain link exchange strategies.

The best kind of link exchange is one that offers a contextual link to both parties.  So instead of creating a "page-of-links" that no one will even read, placing a contextual link in an article that is related to your link partner's site.  The search engines will see this link as a much better quality link than a link from a page full of links to other sites.

Link Directories shouldn't be ignored altogether however.  There are some good ones which are mentioned below. None of these directories require a link back to them and they all have a fairly high page rank.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are small, keyword focused pages that mainly serve the purpose of getting the visitor to your affiliated web site.  They usually offer no value to the website as a whole, and are often cluttered with several different affiliate links.

Google is intelligent and can identify these page types. A site may be penalised if Google or Yahoo! etc. finds Doorway Pages within its limits.

Hidden or Tiny Text

Using white text on a white background or making your text so small it is hardly visible to the human eye is one of the oldest search engine tricks in the book.

Many people would use this technique to hide large numbers of keyword phrases they wanted to rank highly for, by hiding the text at the very bottom or top of the page and make it match the background colour so they were invisible.  Others would use a tiny font to add these keywords in various places all over the site.  The human eye may have a difficult time finding them but the search engine spiders would.

Too Much Duplicated Content

If the majority of a site uses copyrighted and or duplicated material without another webmaster's permission then Google or Yahoo! etc. will penalise the site's page ranking.

Search Engines appreciate relevant, unique content.  It is after all, what drives their success.  They disapprove of the same articles showing up in the results, so they closely monitor duplicated information.

Popular Search Engines and their Page Ranking Techniques

The Google Search Engine

The Google Search Engine predominantly uses site links to rank websites. The larger the number of websites that link to your site the better your ranking will be. This is much more difficult to engineer and tends to be more accurate. Google does take certain aspects of Meta Tagging into account but prefers to quantify the importance of a site's incoming links from external sources.

Google combines its "PageRank" system with a text-matching engine that finds pages that are both important and relevant to your search. This not only means that it searches for the number of times a term appears on a page, it also examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for the query. This is quite a complicated process but it uses thousands of networked PCs to handle the workload in order to retrieve results in the fastest time.

The Yahoo! Search Engine

Yahoo! ranks web pages according to their relevance to a particular query by analysing document features, including text, title and description accuracy, source, associated links, and other unique document characteristics. A single search gives you immediate results from a database that is updated daily to capture newly created and changing pages, including late breaking news and timely events.

Popular Link Directories which may Aid Page Ranking

The Yahoo! Directory

Boasting over 12 million daily visitors, Yahoo! can send more traffic to a website than all the other search engines combined. Website submission to their Directory is reviewed completely manually, which is why it can take up to 8 weeks for a website to appear in their site listings. Using individuals to review the websites submitted has numerous benefits, including the ability to reject sites which are fraudulent about their aims and subject matter, or are built to a low standard. This is of course unlikely when the price for businesses to submit their sites is $299 (£160) and therefore the majority of sites submitted will be a polished, finished product.
 
Currently Yahoo! is only accepting paid listings for their business and economy categories, and still allows free submission to non-business categories. The paid listing option is the recommended option (when available) and costs $299 for an initial review and an annual subscription to renew membership to the directory. This doesn't guarantee that you will be listed in Yahoo!; it only guarantees that they will review your site within seven business days. It is very important to follow Yahoo!'s guidelines when submitting a site to ensure that the $299 isn't wasted if the site is rejected.

Once a site has been successfully submitted having had its meta tags and meta descriptions fully reviewed, the yahoo! search engine will use these to rank the site within searches. If a site is not submitted to Yahoo! search, then the Yahoo! search engines may eventually find the site if there are plenty of other successfully submitted sites linking to it.

The main benefit of submitting a site is through Yahoo!'s improved external link weighting. Yahoo! is classed as an important site and holds a higher weighting when links to an external site are counted. Some believe that adding a site to a registered link directory will improve the site's standings within search engines.

The Open Directory Project

Another Directory worth adding your site to is DMOZ.org or the Open Directory Project. This service is completely free to all customers and as with the Yahoo! directory it relies on members of the public to monitor the sites which are submitted. Many search engines continue to use this service to improve the relevance of their search results.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, focussing on meta tags, link lists, number of external links (sites that link to you), etc. is no longer the most efficient way of improving ranking. 

The best techniques to having search engines hold your site in high regard are building a website with lots of unique content, submitting a site to a number of high-quality sites to link back to you (Yahoo!, The Open Directory, etc.) and developing a good link exchange program (as described above).

Introducing new content and making the site as useful as possible is also a way to encourage people to link to a site voluntarily and therefore the link popularity of your site will begin to increase.

Writing for humans and not the search engine spiders will also help. By forgetting about keyword density (the ratio of a keyword phrase to total body content) and just directing the focus of the site toward real people will improve standings with Google and Yahoo! etc.

Finally by not taking shortcuts, being ethical and working hard to create the best site possible will be a more successful way of improving page rankings than any other type of Search Engine Optimisation.