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Assuming that you are all reasonably familiar with HTML. If you have ever looked at the source code for an HTML page, you probably noticed text like this wherever a hyperlink appeared:

<a href=http://www.jenerate.com/website_design>Website Design</a>

When a web browser reads this, it knows that the text “Website Design” should be hyperlinked to the web page http://www.jenerate.com. Incidentally, “Website Design” in this case is the “anchor text” of the link. When a spider reads this text, it thinks, “Okay, the page http://www.jenerate.com is relevant to the text on this page, and very relevant to the term `SEO Chat.’”

Let’s get a little more complicated.

<a href=http://www.jenerate.com/website_designtitle="Great Website Design Service" rel="nofollow">Website Design</a>

Now what? The anchor text hasn’t changed, so the link will still look the same when the web browser displays it. But a spider will think, “Okay, not only is this page relevant to the term `Website Design,’ it is also relevant to the phrase `Great Website Design Service’ and there’s a relationship between the page I’m crawling now and this hyperlink. It says that this link doesn’t count as a ‘vote’ for the page being to which it's being linked. Okay, so it won’t add to the page rank.”

That last point, about the link not counting as a vote for the page being linked to, is what the rel="nofollow" tag does. This tag evolved to address the problem of people submitting linked comments to blogs that said things like "Visit my pharmaceutical site!" That kind of comment is an attempt by the commenter to raise their own website's position in the search engine rankings. It's called comment spam, most major search engines don't like comment spam because it skews their results, making them less relevant. As you may have guessed, the “nofollow” tag in the “rel” attribute is specifically for search engines; it really isn't there to be noticed by anyone else. Yahoo!, MSN, and Googlerecognise it, but AskJeeves does not support "nofollow", its crawler simply ignores the "nofollow" tag.

In some cases, a link may be assigned to an image. The hyperlink would then include the name of the image, and might include some alternate text in an “alt” attribute, which can be helpful for voice-based browsers used by the blind. It also helps spiders, because it gives them another clue for what the page is about.

Hyperlinks may take other forms on the web, but by and large those forms do not pass ranking or 'spidering' value. In general, the closer a link is to the classic <a href=”URL”>text</a>, the easier it is for a spider to follow a link, and vice versa.

Information supplied by SEO Chat

Most of the stumbling blocks listed in the previous article are ones you may have accidentally put in the way of spiders. This next set of stumbling blocks includes some that website owners might use on purpose to block a search engine spider. While one of the most obvious reasons for blocking a spider has already been mentioned above (content that users must pay to see), there are certainly others: the content itself might be free, but should not be easily available to everyone, for example.

Pages that can be accessed only after filling out a form and hitting “Submit” might as well be closed doors to spiders. Think of them as not being able to push buttons or type. Likewise, pages that require use of a drop down menu to access might not be 'spidered' and the same holds true for documents that can only be accessed via a search box.

Documents that are purposefully blocked will usually not be 'spidered'. This can be handled with a robots meta tag or robots.txt file. You can find other articles that discuss the robots.txt file on SEO Chat.

Pages that require a log-in block search engine spiders. Remember the “spiders can’t type” observation above. Just how are they going to log in to get to the page?

Please make a special note of pages that redirect before showing content. Not only will that not get your page indexed, it could get your site banned. Search engines refer to this tactic as “cloaking” or “bait-and-switch.”

If you have any questions about what is considered legitimate and what isn’t, you can read up on Google’s guidelines for webmasters at http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/guidelines.html

Now that you know what will make spiders choke, how do you encourage them to go where you want them to? The key is to provide direct HTML links to each page you want the spiders to visit. Also, give them a shallow pool in which to play. Spiders usually start on your home page, if any part of your site cannot be accessed from there, chances are the spider won’t see it. This is where use of a site map can be invaluable.

Information supplied by SEO Chat

You’re probably thinking chiefly of your human visitors when you set up your website’s navigation, as well you should. But certain kinds of navigation structures will trip up the spiders, making it less likely for Internet visitors to find your site in the first place.

As an added bonus, many of the things you do to your site, that will make it easier for a spider to find content, will often make it easier for visitors to navigate your site.

It’s worth keeping in mind, that you might not want spiders to be able to index everything on your site. If you own a site with content that users pay a fee to access, you probably wouldn’t want a Google bot to grab that content and show it to anyone who enters the right keywords.

There are ways to deliberately block spiders from such content. In keeping with the rest of this article, which is intended mainly as an introduction, they will only be mentioned briefly here.

Dynamic URLs are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for search engine spiders. In particular, pages with two or more dynamic parameters will give a spider fits. You know a dynamic URL when you see it, it usually has a lot of “garbage” in it such as question marks, equal signs, ampersands (&) and percent signs. These pages are great for human users, who usually get to them by setting certain parameters on a page.

For example, typing a zip code into a box at weather.com will return a page that describes the weather for a particular area of the US - and a dynamic URL as the page location.

There are other ways in which spiders don’t like complexity. For example, pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the same site can make them get tired with just one look. A spider may not follow each link. If you are trying to build a site map, there are better ways to organize it.

Pages that are buried more than three clicks from your website’s home page also might not be crawled. Spiders don’t like to go that deep. For that matter, many humans can get “lost” on a website with that many levels of links if there isn’t some kind of navigational guidance.

Pages that require a “Session ID” or cookie to enable navigation also might not be 'spidered'. Spiders aren’t browsers, and don’t have the same capabilities. They may not be able to retain these forms of identification.

Another stumbling block for spiders is pages that are split into “frames.” Many web designers like to use frames; it allows them to keep page navigation in one place even when a user scrolls through content. But spiders find pages with frames confusing. To them, content is content, and they have no way of knowing which pages should go in the search results. Frankly, many users don’t like pages with frames either; rather than providing a cleaner interface, such pages often look cluttered.

Information supplied by SEO Chat

You know how important it is to score high in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). But your site isn't featuring on the first three pages, and you don't understand why? It could be that you're confusing the web crawlers trying to index it. How can you find out? Keep reading.

You have a masterful website, with lots of relevant content, but it isn’t coming up high in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). You know that if your site isn’t on those early pages, searchers probably won’t find you. You can’t understand why you’re apparently invisible to Googleand the other major search engines. Your rivals hold higher spots in the SERPs, and their sites aren’t nearly as well presented as yours.

Search engines aren’t people. In order to handle the tens of billions of web pages that comprise the World Wide Web, search engine companies have almost completely automated their processes. A software program isn’t going to look at your site with the same “eyes” as a human being. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a website that is a joy to behold for your visitors. But it does mean that you need to be aware of the ways in which search engines “see” your site differently and plan around them.

Despite the complexity of the web, and dealing with all that data at speed, search engines actually perform a short list of operations in order to return relevant results to their users. There are four short list operations which can go awry in different ways. It isn’t so much that the search engine itself has gone awry, it may have simply encountered something with which it was not programmed to deal. Alternatively the way in which it was programmed to deal with whatever it encountered led to less than desirable results.

Understanding how search engines operate will help you understand what can go wrong. All search engines perform the following four tasks:

Web crawling
Search engines send out automated programs, sometimes called “bots” or “spiders,” which use the web’s hyperlink structure to “crawl” its pages. According to some of our best estimates, search engine spiders have crawled maybe half of the pages that exist on the Internet.

Document indexing
After spiders crawl a page, its content needs to be put into a format that makes it easy to retrieve when a user queries the search engine. Thus, pages are stored in a giant, tightly managed database that makes up the search engine’s index. These indexes contain billions of documents, which are delivered to users in mere fractions of a second.

Query processing
When a user queries a search engine, which happens hundreds of millions of times each day, the engine examines its index to find documents that match. Queries that look superficially the same can yield very different results. For example, searching for the phrase “field and stream magazine,” without quotes around it, yields more than four million results in Google. Do the same search with the quote marks, and Google returns only 19,600 results. This is just one of many modifiers a searcher can use to give the database a better idea of what should count as a relevant result.

Ranking results
Google isn’t going to show you all 19,600 results on the same page - and even if it did, it needs some way to decide which ones should show up first. Thus, the search engine runs an algorithm on the results to calculate which ones are most relevant to the query. These are shown first, with all the others in descending order of relevance.

Now that you have some idea of the processes involved, it’s time to take a closer look at each one. This should help you understand how things go right, and how and why these tasks can go “wrong.”

Information supplied by SEO Chat

The Google AdWords team has announced that they are changing the way that the "Quality Score" is derived for AdWords advertisers. They want to encourage advertisers to provide greater relevancy between the advertisement and the page that a searcher would land on when clicking through an AdWords advertisement link.

For example; if a searcher looking to buy a "video game controller" clicked through an AdWords link and landed on an advertiser's page that focused on computer monitors, the relevance would be fairly low. Thus from a searcher's perspective, the experience might be considered poor when using AdWords. If an AdWords advertiser does not provide a focused landing page, the advertiser will likely end up spending more of their advertising budget on key phrases if the content is not deemed relevant by Google.

Overall, Google wants searchers to have a great experience when using AdWords and then continue or increase their use of Google and AdWords listings. AdWords, if you're not aware of it, is how Google makes its money and is therefore largely responsible for their $100B+ market capitalisation.

From the Inside AdWords blog:

"...Advertisers who are providing robust and relevant content will see little change. However, for those who are providing a less positive user experience, the Quality Score may decrease and in turn increase the minimum bid required for the keyword to run..."

There is a guidelines section for building landing pages on Google which gives advice that one might use even for normal web page building:

"...Ensure that your landing page is relevant to your keywords and your ad text...In general, build pages that provide substantial and useful information to the end-user. If your ad does link to a page consisting of mostly ads or general search results (such as a directory or catalogue page), provide additional information beyond what the user may have seen in your ad or on the page prior to clicking on your ad..."

How do you focus your AdWordscampaign so that you are targeting the right group? Consider running a comprehensive analytics suite like WebTrends in order to track search engine referrals and the resulting behaviour of the traffic being generated by your AdWords campaigns. Consider the behaviours that you will be measuring such as:

You can test several alternative landing pages over a short period of time and see exactly where you have the most success, then further tweak your landing page as you gain an understanding of what content converts an AdWords click through into sale or win.

The ALT text associated with the images on web pages has traditionally been considered an important factor for search engine optimization (SEO). This may have been true in the past, but recent research has shown that this is no longer the case.

In an effort to improve the relevance of search engine results, the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) have downgraded the importance of ALT text when determining a page's ranking. This development is similar to the evolution of the META Keyword tag, which has also lost some of its weight in search engine optimization over the years.

SEO expert Jerry West conducted research to bring this information to light. For a detailed description of his testing set-up, read Robin Nobles' article on the topic.

Does this mean that you no longer need to use ALT text for the images on your web pages? No, it simply means that using the ALT text as an area to stuff keywords is not really going to help optimize your web page. It's best to use the ALT text the way the tag was originally intended, with your visitors in mind.

The ALT text is one of the primary ways people with disabilities access the content of your images. Guidelines for the proper use of ALT text are outlined by the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. The guidelines state that "A text equivalent for every non-text element shall be provided (e.g., via 'alt', 'longdesc', or in element content)." Describe the image in a way that naturally enhances what the visitor is seeing, and try to include your keywords in context.

Creating complementary ALT text for your images will improve your visitor's overall experience, and that can affect your sales as much as a well optimized page.

Information sourced from WebPosition website.