How to Get Your Webpages Ready for Indexing:
Have Pity on Poor Googley-Eyes
Web Marketing Today Premium, Issue 77, February 15, 2004
 No confirmed photos of Googley-Eyes are known to exist. This purports to be a photo of her step-brother, Gerald, but its authenticity cannot be established. |
It's a deeply personal story, the story of Googley-Eyes,* a poor, overworked search engine spider, forced by her bosses to spend her entire working life in the murky caves and shadows of the Internet's underbelly. Like a dark butterfly of the netherworld, she swoops from one website to another, alighting for a few seconds, sucking up code, then moving on, one website after another, day after day. She ravenously devours HTML code, and -- if she can digest it -- as she leaves a delectable website, she spins delicate filaments behind her providing a path for others to follow.
She's a humble data entry clerk more than a real analyst, you might say, but one who is seeking to better herself. When she alights and begins to imbibe webpage code, she struggles to understand it as it courses through her soft body. Sometimes she does. And when she does, magic happens. When people search for a keyword on a search engine -- they find what they're looking for. And if it's your webpage they find, you succeed too.
Help the Search Engine Indexing on Your Webpage
If you can get your webpage ready for Googley-Eyes' visit, you'll make her very happy. It's my job to help you do that so well that, at the end of the day, your webpage is properly indexed for the keyword or keyphrase that you are trying to emphasize.
Let me explain how a search engine figures out what is important on your webpage. We'll be looking at:
- Title
- Description Meta Tag
- Keywords Meta Tag
- Headings
- Body Text
- Alt Tags
- Hyperlinks
and we'll then spend a few minutes looking at website navigation systems.
Not Tricking but Helping
To understand how to get your webpage properly indexed, however, you must put yourself in Googley-Eyes' place. Empathize with her plight. One webpage after another. On and on, throughout her entire shift. The next day her quota is ten thousand more websites. It's never ending. Scan the webpage, while on the run try to figure out what it's really about, then rush on to another. Two billion webpages and running, literally running all day long. Starting to feel sorry for her, aren't you?
To ease Googley-Eyes' pain you need to give her clues written clearly and boldly in your webpage. Notice the attitude here: help, assist, enable.
If you think Googley-Eyes' life is tough now, you should have seen her a few years ago. Today smart Internet marketers are really trying to help the poor girl. But until recently the attitude was trick, deceive, manipulate, pull a fast one on the search engine. Frankly, it's hard to deceive a search engine these days. Googley-Eyes may have dark circles under her eyes, but she's smart as a tack. She'll know if you're trying to trick her.
Help her. Make her life easy so that in her hurried rounds of your website, she has clues galore to guide her. Let me explain how you can do that.
Focused Webpages vs. General
One of the best ways to help Googley-Eyes is to make each webpage on your site about a specific topic. The more a webpage rambles on about five or six topics, the more confused she becomes. For a moment she thinks it's about camcorders, then the topic shifts to sunrise on a beach in Maui. Now it's the HP plant in China that produces computers. Poor girl. She just throws up her hands in despair. (And this is serious, because it's not clear which of her eight legs have hands on them.) Focus the content of each page. Break up long, general pages into several specific, one-topic webpages, a minimum of 250 to 500 words.
(Note: I don't break up long articles like this one into several pages, because I'm trying to please human readers as well as Googley-Eyes. But the article has a clear focus.)
Title Tag
From a search engine standpoint, perhaps the most important element of your webpage is the title. "What is this page about?" Googley-Eyes asks herself. "Probably the title will give me some clues." In normal webpages the title describes the content.
If you have a merely "ho-hum" title, you won't get many click-throughs, even if you rank near the top. People click on what they think will help them most. Make the title interesting to humans, not just spiders. Help the humans who are scanning search results.
But help Googley-Eyes, too. Your title ought to describe what's on the particular webpage. Make sure you include in your title the important keywords for that webpage. Don't include keywords that aren't really the point of the webpage. Any keywords found in the title that don't reflect the content of the webpage itself can work against you. Limit it to 6 to 8 words; Google only displays about 62 characters for searchers to see.
Keep the title focused, not general. Put the most important keywords first where Googley-Eyes can see them -- it's called keyword prominence. For example, let's say your company name is "Acme Ammunition, LLC" and you recently acquired the Lone Ranger Ammunition Company. Your hot product isn't just shells and bullets any more, it's silver bullets. You're the exclusive supplier and people are looking for them. For your homepage title....
|
Not |
Acme Ammunition, LLC |
|
But |
Silver bullets from Acme Ammunition, formerly Lone Ranger Ammunition |
Leave out anything that people won't be searching on, while still making it readable. Interior webpages shouldn't repeat the homepage title, but rather have specific titles containing keywords suited to their own individual content.
If you've done your titles right, Googley-Eyes has already formed a good idea of what you webpage is about. But she doesn't stop here.
Description Meta Tag
The next thing Googley-Eyes comes to is the Description Meta Tag, if you have one. She'll read and digest it -- more food for thought, so to speak.
Let's help her. The Description Meta Tag should be a one- or two-sentence description of the content of your webpage -- no more than about 250 characters. It should also be rich with the various keywords someone might search on to find content in this particular page.
Are Description Meta Tags vitally important? Not as much as they used to be a few years ago. But it's foolish to leave them out, since Googley-Eyes does read them. If they are thoughtfully written, they help her focus on what's really important in this webpage.
Keywords Meta Tag
You may have a Keywords Meta Tag, too, but these days Googley-Eyes skips over it. Too many times in the past evil spammers have stuffed this tag full of keywords designed to trick her, and now she's distrustful, gun-shy.
Does that mean you should leave the Keywords Meta Tag out? No. Yahoo's new search engine does scan the Keyword Meta Tag, as others may too. Right now Google is King of the Mountain, but a year or two from now Microsoft and Yahoo could command significant market share. I recommend including a Keywords Meta Tag but not obsessing over it.
Here's what I do. I write the Description Meta Tag in a keyword-rich manner. Then I remove every word that wouldn't be found in a search and leave only the important keywords (with no repeated words) -- a space separating each -- and put them in a Keywords Meta Tag. Here's an example from a brief review of "Product Idea Evaluator" that appeared in Web Marketing Today recently:
|
Description |
This software uses keywords to help you locate niche opportunities that are both profitable and not too competitive, computing relative profitability based on conversion rate (CR), click-through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI), Pay Per Click Effectiveness Index (PPCEI), and bid prices. [277 characters, a bit too long] |
|
Keywords |
keywords niche opportunities profitable competitive research profitability based on conversion rate CR click-through CTR cost per click CPC Keyword Effectiveness Index KEI Pay Per Click PPCEI bid prices [165 characters, satisfactory length] |
This is just one article among hundreds, so I haven't taken extreme care to put most important keywords first or to trim down the description to exactly 250 characters or under. But it's done, and I'm happy. So is Googley-Eyes.
Headings
Next she comes to some headlines -- H1, H2, H3 in HTML-ese. "Maybe the headlines will give me some clues to what this webpage is about," mutters Googley-Eyes, so she scans them, looking for keywords. She's learned from experience that headlines usually contain important hints to the content of the page. She starts with the name of the webpage (article title), typically usually found between H1 or H2 tags, and works down.
I've found that writing with subheadings helps Googley-Eyes figure out the webpage easily. Each of my subheadings (H3 in my case) is likely to contain an important keyword for that section of the document. Not only do subheadings make it easy for readers to scan the document for meaning, it's easy for Googley-Eyes too. If you're looking at her intently when she sees well-written subheadings, you'll probably see the muscles around her eyes relax a bit, her frown soften, and just the wisp of a smile appear around her mouth. "This page will be a snap," she mutters. "I get it!"
Body Text
But the body of the article is where the rubber meets the road. Googley-Eyes is used to being tricked with titles, meta tags, and headings that are bogus. But when she gets to the body text, she can spot a phony a mile away. She quickly scans the main points, clicking off important keywords and their synonyms. "Looks okay," she says. In the first paragraph she'll expect to find the most important ideas -- that's how normal humans write, she's been told, though she's heard that some human schools don't teach writing very well. Sometimes she also finds a summary paragraph. If this is a good webpage, a normal webpage, the keywords she finds in the first and last paragraphs often echo the keywords found in the title, the meta tags, and the headings. Together, if they are all congruent, they give her important clues as to the real focus of this webpage.
And here's the point. Googley-Eyes and her analyst bosses will rank the page higher for "silver bullets" and "ammunition" because know it is clearly relevant to those particular keywords.
Fuzzy, general webpages that ignore using keywords in the title, meta tags, headings, and body text confuse Googley-Eyes. "Just what is this webpage about," she says, scratching her tiny head with one of her front legs. "I thought I had it figured out, but now I'm hopelessly lost," she complains. "Oh, well, if I can't figure it out, it probably isn't important anyway," she says, marking the webpage "basket case" and moving on. Oh, it'll probably show up in a keyword search -- if you're willing to persist to page 14 or so. But it won't rank up near the top, not if Googley-Eyes can't understand it.
Alt Tags
A couple more clues Googley-Eyes is trained to look for: every graphic or picture IMG tag has the possibility of an ALT element, a text description of the graphic so that the blind and people scanning the web with graphics turned off can know what the picture represents. If Googley-Eyes finds a graphic that isn't a repeat from the other pages in this website (such as navigation system graphics), her eight eyes perk up and she takes note. She's learned that ALT tags sometimes give clues to the webpage. If she sees a graphic marked "silver bullets used by the Masked Man," it registers.
Hyperlinks
She also scans hyperlinks. If some hyperlinked words say advantages of silver bullets, for example, she makes note of it. If the file name of the URL this hyperlink points to is silver-bullets.html, that clinches it. She's pretty sure now that this webpage is about silver bullets, and when she sends her ranking recommendations to her boss, she'll include that finding in her report.
Finicky about Site Navigation
I don't like to say this about someone in print, but Googley-Eyes is kind of finicky when she sashays through a website. Let me tell you some things that turn her off:
Frames
Googley-Eyes really doesn't like frames. They confuse her, frankly. Yes, if the programmer were careful to use NOFRAMES tags properly she'd be able to find her way. But she's apt to index the content window without the navigation window. Stuff like that. She's kind of picky, "high-strung," some might say (who have seen her hanging by a thread).
Dynamically-generated webpages
For the techy that she is, you'd expect Googley-Eyes to be able to zip through webpages produced by the content manager programs typically used by large websites. But she can be easily overwhelmed. For example, if she finds a long URL with a question mark in the middle, followed by long strings of numbers and letters, she may just balk. Don't get me wrong: she does index some dynamically-generated webpages, but more slowly, under duress. I've heard her scream out, "Give me a break! Who do you think I am, superwoman?" She has no idea whether she's seeing a session ID after that question mark or an article number. She doesn't know if the site has 15 pages or 1,500. Especially, dear merchant, don't make it too hard for her to find your product pages. Getting those indexed properly brings the traffic that is your store's lifeblood.
If you have dynamically-generated pages that aren't getting indexed, here are some ways to help Googley-Eyes next time she comes calling:
- Ask your programmer to employ "URL rewriting" to simplify the URL for the search engine spider.
- Use a site map that gives HTML links to each of your product pages.
- Use paid inclusion for important webpages. Note: Google doesn't take paid inclusion at this writing, but Yahoo and some others do. Spending $25 a year to get a product page indexed is a bargain, especially since that that product page could earn you thousands of dollars per year if properly indexed.
Flash and JavaScript Menus
Here's another case of Googley-Eyes not keeping up with the times. She can read the text contained in Flash, but she can't follow a navigation system constructed solely of Flash or JavaScript, as nifty as they are for humans. Fortunately, there's an easy fix. At the bottom of the home page include hypertext links to your sectional pages. Then on each sectional page provide links to the webpages in that section. This way Googley-Eyes can find her way through the site and you can have your handy-dandy menu system -- the best of both worlds.
Don't Get Googley-Eyes Mad at You
Now how do I say this nicely? Let me start with a compliment. Googley-Eyes is patient. Even for a computer she's patient. But sometimes she can get ticked off. Really mad. If Googley-Eyes suspects that you're trying to trick her or fool her, she can be a terror -- throws a fit, bites people. She might not notice your tom-foolery normally, but if your competitor reports you to her boss and she's directed to take a spin (no pun intended) to your site to see if the report is true, she can turn on you with real venom. Here's what she can't stand:
- Keyword stuffing, that is, repeating keywords in meta tags.
- Duplicate content on a number of webpages, such as might be used in a set of doorway pages.
- Hiding text by displaying white text on a white background.
- Cloaking high ranking webpages by showing the searching engine spider one webpage and the general public another.
That's pretty much it. She really isn't an angry person. Not at all. But don't get her started. In extreme cases she could have your site banned entirely from the search engine. It's not worth it!
Now I hope you know Googley-Eyes better. You know her needs, her likes and dislikes. In the 2003 Academy Award winning movie "Chicago," there's a song, belted out by Queen Latifah, that reminds me of Googley-Eyes. She might have sung it, in fact, if her voice weren't so soft:
"When you're good to Momma,
Momma's good to you."
Maybe this isn't just coincidence. The song was written by Fred Ebb and John Kander -- the same pair that wrote the music for -- would you believe -- "Kiss of the Spider Woman."
Foolish DisclaimerFor the sake of full disclosure, Googley-Eyes refused an interview, so I sat here in my office and made up the whole thing. No, I didn't hear her mutter anything, actually. Nor can I attest to the expressions on her face when she views a webpage. I tell you this because I don't want to risk being blacklisted by the New York Times for fabricating a story or anything like that. They're kind of sensitive these days. But this is the way Googley-Eyes acts. Everybody says so. Really! (Note: If English is a second language for you, there's an attempt at humor, however feeble, in this article. I hope it doesn't overly confuse you. And if you are Googley-Eyes reading this sentence, "I love you." Be gentle with my website. Sorry we couldn't meet in person. Maybe next time.) |
*If "Googley-Eyes" sounds familiar, it's probably because you're old. According to the Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang (1994), "google-eyes" came from "goo-goo eyes" (1901) "to cast amorous glances at," also "google-eyed" (1902-03), as in "The men were all google-eyed." Barney Google and Snuffy Smith was one of the longest-running comic strips in history, created by Billy DeBeck in 1919, distributed by King Features, and appearing on a US postage stamp in 1995. "Barney Google" ("with the goo-goo-goo-gley eyes") was a 1923 hit song by Billy Rose and Con Conrad about the cartoon character. Of course, any resemblance of Googley-Eyes to the Google search engine is purely co-incidental.
