SEO forum section?

[Guest LH91325]

How about adding a forum section to discuss SEO: search engine optimization? Or is SEO a proper topic to discuss on the W3Schools forum? And if so, which section?

[boen_robot]

There isn't much to be said about SEO, so it's not really worth a forum... I mean "Content is king", "Don't try to lie to Google", "links to your content count the most" are the only constants. Everything else can pretty much be derived out of those, like- Make sites validate (Content is king)- Don't use tables for layout (Content is king)- Advertise (Links count)- Post in relevant forums that allow it (Links count) but don't spam (Don't lie to Google).- Repeat important keywords across a page's natural content, including headings, link text, URLs, alts, etc. (Content is king) and avoid having "artificial" content solely for SEO (Don't lie to Google)- and so on...The best places for SEO discussions are the HTML forum (for code related issues) and General (for advertising and other social kind of stuff).

[thescientist]

I have one question. Say you have a site generated by a server-side language like PHP, will that have any impact on SEO? Or more specifically, a search crawlers ability to rank it? Do <meta> tags still have relevance these days?

[Guest LH91325]

There isn't much to be said about SEO, so it's not really worth a forum... I mean "Content is king", "Don't try to lie to Google", "links to your content count the most" are the only constants. Everything else can pretty much be derived out of those, like - Make sites validate (Content is king)- Don't use tables for layout (Content is king)- Advertise (Links count)- Post in relevant forums that allow it (Links count) but don't spam (Don't lie to Google).- Repeat important keywords across a page's natural content, including headings, link text, URLs, alts, etc. (Content is king) and avoid having "artificial" content solely for SEO (Don't lie to Google)- and so on...

I think you're being dismissive in underestimating the value of SEO. Yes of course content is a very important thing, but there are many other ways to optimize your site than what you've listed. I'm not talking about ways of raising your page rank artificially. In fact most artifices are harmful, or become harmful later when the SEs catch onto them and change their algorithms. As an example of something you should do, put something meaningful in your META description. I discovered that Google uses this exact text (when available) when your page shows up in a search. Before I used it Google had to abstract a short phrase (dozen words or so) where the keyword density was the highest. That resulted in random snatches of text showing up in my search result. Now I control the text that shows up there and I can use my authorial skills to make the most attractive pitch why a person should visit my site instead of one of the other results. The more desirable your link becomes (like presenting an attractive description) the more often people will click it. Google monitors which results are clicked and how often, and the more people click the higher your rank gets. The higher your rank gets the more people click your link. Content on your site is important but content in your META description is vitally important too. Currently I'm working on getting a picture next to my search results. (Not an author picture, that's easy, I mean a picture off the content page.) The search result links with pictures are more attractive. Being more attractive they rise in the ranks faster because more people click them, etc. I know how to do this now but it won't be worth the trouble until I get more visual content. Once I have a picture on most pages I can implement the image in search results and I'm sure it will benefit my rankings. I've been doing SEO incrementally for the last few years but it's been only the last several months since I figured out how to log which SEs are sending me traffic, what the search terms are, and what my rank is. (I can tell rank directly only from Google referrals, I have to manually repeat the visitor's search to find my ranks on Yahoo, Bing, etc.) Yeah you can tell some of that stuff if you join Google Webmaster Tools, but I'm getting MUCH, MUCH better information from my own analysis software than I get from Google. Since I began getting my page ranks from site visitors I've been amazed at how high some of my ranks are. Admittedly I see ranks only from visitors who actually landed on my pages, but I often show up in the top 10 ranks for search terms relevant to my content, even #1, #2 or #3, and that's over well developed commercial sites with similar content. At first I thought I just couldn't be right, but it is. And my site is a hobbyist site, nothing sold, no advertising, nobody creating content but me. BTW another tip: add a dynamic sitemap.xml and human readable sitemap.html (particularly the former). The SEs say they don't pay much attention to that but they read it frequently. It's the quickest and most reliable way for web crawlers to discover every content page on your site in an unambiguous manner. Google claims they don't index every page on any particular site but in my case they're wrong. Google Webmaster tools tells me my indexing is 100%. I've got web crawlers visiting my site hundreds of times per day, and in fact I don't quite understand why they keep indexing indexing indexing so frequently since my content doesn't change that fast. They must like me for some reason. SEO is fun because I can see the results of my work. Most people seem to read a few SEO tips and do them on faith, and decide SEO is done. They don't even know if it worked or not.

I have one question. Say you have a site generated by a server-side language like PHP, will that have any impact on SEO? Or more specifically, a search crawlers ability to rank it? Do <meta> tags still have relevance these days?

SEO and server side scripts have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Nor for that matter neither does client side scripts. And very little to do with CSS, if any. Search engines (web crawlers) read whatever HTML and content your site generated by whatever means, static files, server scripting... They ignore much of the HTML other than using it to find the content. (They apparently do attach some importantance to <H1> </H1> content. But the web crawler could care less about how you got your content online. They don't execute client side scripts. They don't load external CSS scripts. Mostly they ignore inline CSS except when taking a preview snapshot of your site. They usually send a stealth web crawler to take the preview snapshots. They don't want you serving different content to humans and crawlers--that's another bad thing to do. People think they can get away with that but those people don't know about the stealth bots. Server scripts don't affect page ranks except to the extent of the HTML that they generate. AFAIK web crawlers have no way of even knowing what server script you're running. Yeah they could look at headers but I think they probably look only at a few relevant ones: 301, 302, 404, maybe 410... (It appears they respond to 503--deducing this from my logs--but that one has no relevance to ranking. They come back later to see if the 503 page went 200...) They could look at the header that says you're running PHP but I can't think of a single reason why they'd care. META tags are of varying importance depending on which ones. As I said, the META description is important but not directly in ranking. META description is used by Google and some other bots as the anchor text when you appear in somebody's search results. The more attractive it is the more people will click it, and the more people that click it the higher your page rank goes. I doubt the web crawler even looks at whatever your description says. It's there for humans to read, indirectly, by appearing in your search results. META keywords are mostly irrelevant. Google says they don't read them and I believe it. It is said that other SEs might still use it. It doesn't hurt to have it as long as you don't stuff it. Stuffing your META keywords hurts your results if you do it to an abusive degree, or so that is said, but that does bring up the contradiction that if they say they don't use it how do they know the keywords are stuffed? My advice is to go lightly on the keywords. Or just leave this META out. META robots is a very useful one too. The choices are "index,follow" "index,nofollow" "noindex,follow" and "noindex,nofollow" They allow you one more means to tell the crawlers which pages to index and which pages lead to other indexable pages. If nothing else you can use this tag to make indexing your site more efficient, get indexed the content you want indexed, and get them on their way. For example, a contact page: noindex-nofollow. You don't want your contact page indexed. There are spammers who look for contact pages to spam, and there's no benefit to you having your contact page come up in search results. META rating such as content = general might be good. It's one way to say your site doesn't need to be restricted to adult only. It's impossible to say whether they look at it though. I'm beginning to look at META canonical, but not for its usual use. I don't have any duplicate content on my site (another thing to avoid) but I'm looking at it as another possible defense against rank hijacking. If you're framed and the hijacker is using a 302 to scrape your content, the theory is that a web crawler will see the duplicate content (the scraper's site and your site) and see the canonical tag, and hopefully decide to keep your page in the ranks instead of the scraper's page. But in any case this META is important for page ranking if your content appears with different URIs on your site. (Another means of controlling duplicate content is your robots.txt file.) Whatever way you control duplicate content, if you don't do something it's likely going to hurt you since duplicate content decreases page rank, or so I've heard. IMO it's easy to be dismissive about SEO being of any importance, but I think there's far more to it than most "webmasters" understand. And I'm not talking about artificial means to attempt to increase page ranking. I think that's always a mistake. But I think good website design and an understanding of SEO can help increase your traffic. And let's remember, it is site traffic that is king. Content is important too, of course, but content matters not at all if there's nobody to read it. For most sites like mine the only way traffic is going to end up there is when search engines send it. Edited May 15, 2012 by LH91325

[boen_robot]

As an example of something you should do, put something meaningful in your META description. I discovered that Google uses this exact text (when available) when your page shows up in a search.

Note that the description itself does not affect your page rank in any way. It's simply the text Google uses after it determines your position by other criteria.

The more desirable your link becomes (like presenting an attractive description) the more often people will click it. Google monitors which results are clicked and how often, and the more people click the higher your rank gets. The higher your rank gets the more people click your link. Content on your site is important but content in your META description is vitally important too.

Goes back to "Content is king".

Currently I'm working on getting a picture next to my search results. (Not an author picture, that's easy, I mean a picture off the content page.) The search result links with pictures are more attractive. Being more attractive they rise in the ranks faster because more people click them, etc. I know how to do this now but it won't be worth the trouble until I get more visual content. Once I have a picture on most pages I can implement the image in search results and I'm sure it will benefit my rankings. I've been doing SEO incrementally for the last few years but it's been only the last several months since I figured out how to log which SEs are sending me traffic, what the search terms are, and what my rank is. (I can tell rank directly only from Google referrals, I have to manually repeat the visitor's search to find my ranks on Yahoo, Bing, etc.) Yeah you can tell some of that stuff if you join Google Webmaster Tools, but I'm getting MUCH, MUCH better information from my own analysis software than I get from Google. Since I began getting my page ranks from site visitors I've been amazed at how high some of my ranks are. Admittedly I see ranks only from visitors who actually landed on my pages, but I often show up in the top 10 ranks for search terms relevant to my content, even #1, #2 or #3, and that's over well developed commercial sites with similar content. At first I thought I just couldn't be right, but it is. And my site is a hobbyist site, nothing sold, no advertising, nobody creating content but me....SEO is fun because I can see the results of my work. Most people seem to read a few SEO tips and do them on faith, and decide SEO is done. They don't even know if it worked or not.

Although tracking your results helps you make SEO decisions, in terms of "what keywords to optimize for", it does so indirectly. People that have trouble installing such (ready made) systems can do so in the "Web servers" forum or the appropriate language forum (e.g. the PHP forum).

BTW another tip: add a dynamic sitemap.xml and human readable sitemap.html (particularly the former). The SEs say they don't pay much attention to that but they read it frequently. It's the quickest and most reliable way for web crawlers to discover every content page on your site in an unambiguous manner. Google claims they don't index every page on any particular site but in my case they're wrong. Google Webmaster tools tells me my indexing is 100%. I've got web crawlers visiting my site hundreds of times per day, and in fact I don't quite understand why they keep indexing indexing indexing so frequently since my content doesn't change that fast. They must like me for some reason.

Sites that are clicked frequently are indexed more regularly. TL;DR

And let's remember, it is site traffic that is king. Content is important too, of course, but content matters not at all if there's nobody to read it. For most sites like mine the only way traffic is going to end up there is when search engines send it.

Shhhh! If site owners hear you, they'll take that literally. And then we wonder why there are still "black hat SEOs". No. Traffic is not king. Traffic is what you get if you treat content as king. Saying "traffic is king" is like saying "The paycheck is what's most important at the end of the day. Sure, the product is important, but no one would make it if they don't get money for it". Sure, but money is what you get if you have a product worth buying.

[eTianbun]

Can you drop a little tip on how to add photo to google search (not author)?

[Ingolme]

Google will index images it finds on your site automatically. The keywords it uses for the image depends mostly on context. Google hasn't made its algorithms public so nobody can tell you specifically about that.

[Guest LH91325]

Note that the description itself does not affect your page rank in any way. It's simply the text Google uses after it determines your position by other criteria.

Description does affect your page rank, indirectly. If you can get your META description to show as the page description in search results, you can make a more attractive pitch than letting the search engine pick a random phrase out of your page. The more attractive you make your page sound the more likely the person doing the web search is to click your link. The search engine counts clicks on your results links as votes to increase your page rank (it's part of the formula). The more attractive your description is the more clicks you get, the more clicks you get the higher your page is ranked, the higher it's ranked the more likely it is to be clicked. Traffic is king. Imagine two sites: one has good content and practically no traffic, the other has poor content and heavy traffic. There isn't any point to having an Internet site with poor or no traffic. (Okay except for test sites like a few I run where I'm observing 'bots.)

[Guest LH91325]

Google will index images it finds on your site automatically. The keywords it uses for the image depends mostly on context. Google hasn't made its algorithms public so nobody can tell you specifically about that.

Yes, they will, but that is only hit and miss whether they will use any images they find, and whether they will show the image in your search results or just use the image in Google image search. Actually they have made their algorithms public regarding the thumbnails appearing in search results. There is of course the G+ and author link-up. And then there's the ... (see below)

Can you drop a little tip on how to add photo to google search (not author)?

Sure. I'm sorry I don't have links for you, but the way to make it likely to have an image show up in your searcch results is to use an image sitemap. I haven't completed my researching the subject, but you either add image data to your sitemap.xml or you add a separate sitemap with the image data in it. (You can have a sitemap that refers to other sitemaps.) I haven't figured out yet which way is best or exactly how to do it but the information is there on what must be done. XML is the key. And all this information came from information pages hosted on Google, written by Google. It's important to note that using an image sitemap or putting image links in your main sitemap is not guaranteed to have the image show up in your search results. Google (and other search engines) never provide any sure way to do anything because as soon as it's a sure thing the cheaters come in and manipulate it. From what I've read on Google's site it's my opinion that if you do it right the images will probably start showing up after a while. It make take quite a while though. The important thing is that you need to be able to pick or influence which image shows up. Too many sites are successfully using it for it to be a matter of chance or accident. My content pages often show up in top 10 ranking, and most of the sites above mine have image thumbnails. That can't be just a coincidence. I expect to move forward on getting thumbnails in my Google results perhaps sometime this summer. I'll know more then when I start actual work on the project. I am sure I can make it happen.

[boen_robot]

Description does affect your page rank, indirectly.

Right. I never said anything otherwise.

Traffic is king. Imagine two sites: one has good content and practically no traffic, the other has poor content and heavy traffic. There isn't any point to having an Internet site with poor or no traffic. (Okay except for test sites like a few I run where I'm observing 'bots.)

From an owner's point of view that is. From a user's point of view, I care about the content. Even if it's on a not-so-popular site, if it's what I need, and Google gives it to me, I'll visit it even if I'm the only person to have ever visited the site.I've had a few instances where I search for one thing, and get on an unpopular (judging by the lacks of comments or significant other content on the) site, and although Google didn't matched my query in full (if it did, the site would probably be popular with that keyword), I still found the information interesting enough to get "side tracked" with it.

[Guest LH91325]

I think we're in fundamental agreement but just expressing it differently. I'm saying that there's no point in putting content on the Internet unless somebody reads it. It logically follows that more people reading your content is better. That's why I say traffic is important. In the real world there isn't much traffic if the content is poor. My own main website is non-commercial, hobby related. Fifteen years ago I just put my HTML content on "da web" and I had no idea at all if anybody was reading it. In the present day I have access to every tool to analyze traffic including custom tools I write myself. Now that I have become aware that there is traffic on my site it has become a secondary hobby to see what I can do to increase my traffic. I already had good content because it expresses what I have to say about my subject. Now I have good traffic too and getting better every day, and I think it's in part to learning and implementing SEO the same way that commercial sites do. It's fun. Good traffic and good content is king!

[boen_robot]

I think we're in fundamental agreement but just expressing it differently. I'm saying that there's no point in putting content on the Internet unless somebody reads it. It logically follows that more people reading your content is better. That's why I say traffic is important. In the real world there isn't much traffic if the content is poor.

Except that your earlier statement implied the opposite is also true - that poor content is OK if many people stumble on it (ala traffic), and I just find myself cringing at the thought.

[Guest LH91325]

It depends on what you want. Traffic is all that some people want. Content scrapers frame your site or steal your content and post it on their site, then either hijack clicks or display paid advertising. What you and I want is good traffic and good content. But all some people want is traffic. They get paid by the visit and don't care what the content is. In an ideal world everybody should want to have good content and good traffic. And they should acquire their content honestly.

[boen_robot]

True, but that doesn't make that sort of reckless - driven only by traffic - behavior OK (=> worthy of a mantra to be said by non-reckless folk).

[Guest LH91325]

In any case this is no longer about having a SEO forum section.