Web Log Costa Blanca

An end-of-year apology to my readers. I don’t post as often as I mean to. One reason is that my posts are becoming too measured—and too all-inclusive. So here is a quick tip for all my readers who are designing or developing Web sites.

It follows from my previous advice on alt text.

You shouldn’t only use words that make it easy for your visitors with visual problems to see your image in their mind’s eye. You should also use a word or phrase from your keyword list. Search engines often pay close attention to the alt text that goes with images.

That’s it. Happy New Year!

I’ve discussed text display in earlier posts. Headers are a special case.

Headers matter to search engine spiders. They also matter to human readers, because they break up the Web page and make it easier to scan. You can quickly see if there’s anything on this page that answers your question or meets your need.

On both counts, therefore, the important thing for a page designer is to have plenty of them. As far as sizes go, you can of course use a style sheet to set them to any size you like. I would myself stick to at most three different sizes. When I’m not defining sizes myself, I find that <h2>s, <h3>s and <h4>s often fit the bill.

Very big headers in standard Web fonts like Arial/Helvetica or Verdana are the visual equivalent of shouting. They need to be saved for unusual special effects. People don’t like being shouted at.

At the other end there are situations when it’s useful to have an <h4> at the top of every paragraph (or two). It makes for easier reading. But don’t let the browser use its default padding. Make sure the header is really close to the paragraph below, and that the only obvious gap is after the paragraph before.

Think hard about horizontal positioning, too, and the invisible vertical gridlines that our eyes often find satisfying. In far too many of my early sites, I centred headers. This can give a Web page a ragged, untidy look. I now tend to go for vertical alignment—headers are either left aligned, or indented identically (say 10px or 2% or 5em or …). It makes for a stronger line.

I keep coming across these companies that promise you a top position on Google within 24 hours. Naturally, they don’t spell out how they are going to do this. They are simply feeding off the myth that there is some kind of secret trick which will assure you high rankings.

If there were such a thing, then Google would be risking the very thing that got it where it is. People took to using Google, rather than AltaVista or Excite or whatever, because it found them the sites they were looking for. The whole thrust of Google’s development is to serve searchers rather than site owners.

It relies on a famous algorithm, which, given a search query, puts Web sites in order, from number 1 down. I notice that in the latest version of this algorithm, it is widely supposed to be giving extra weight to domain age. The older a site, the higher a rank it will get.

You’d think this would put the “24-hour” cowboys out of business. But I doubt it. There are always people dreaming of instant success—and other people willing to take their money.

As a site owner, you want visitors. To get visitors, you need people who are searching for sites like yours to find your site first. That means getting properly indexed on search machines (“ranking high for your keywords”). Which in turn means knowing how to handle search engine spiders.

Readers of this blog may have looked at my long article on search engine optimisation, on the main Web Costa Blanca site. You can also check out any earlier posts, by looking at the ‘Search engine optimisation’ category.

Here are two things you can do to catch spiders—before you write a single word of text or create a single graphic.

1. Name your files for spiders. Apart from your index page—and you can give that a different name by adding a rule to your .htaccess file, if you really want to—give all your pages names which spell out their content, using words that visitors might type into search engine boxes. For example: best-cheap-whatnots.html.

2. Write your titles for spiders. Use the same or similar words in your title tags. These appear in the browser’s title bar, at the very top of the display, and most human visitors ignore them. Spiders think they are crucial.

(Incidentally, some people use the same title tag on every page of their site. This may attract visitors to the site—but they may not get to the pages you think are important. There’s a lot to be said for varying title tags to get different visitors to different pages. This is up to you.)

Have fun!

For the main Web Costa Blanca site, I’ve already written a quite long article on search engine optimisation. This is something which, quite naturally, obsesses website owners. If you have a product, you want people to buy it; if you have a message, you want it to get across to people. This won’t happen if they can’t find your site on a search engine. And the more competition there is (similar products, similar messages) the more important it is that people find your site first.

If you’ve already read my article, here are a couple of extras. One caveat, one treat.

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