A few weeks back I wrote on some important aspects of content optimization for your website: what your text actually contains, and how to maximize your keywords.  You content also depends on the usability of it and your website.  Here are some additional factors to consider when optimizing your content:

Code
When search engine robots come to your website, they don’t stand back and take a look at the pretty pictures and neat fonts you might have used.  They’re actually a program that downloads your page for indexation by the search engine.  The robots also identify all the links in the document, making note of future crawling opportunities.  (To see how search engine spiders view your site, try iWeb’s Search Engine Spider Simulator.)

To make sure your source code is as clean and spiderable as possible (as well as draws attention to important keywords and links), there are a few easy steps that can be taken:

• Don’t have any unnecessary HTML comments.
• Keep Javascript and CSS stylesheets in separate folders.
• Avoid in-line styles.  Make all your styles using CSS.

To produce the cleanest code for spidering, CSS is the way to go.  If you’re building your website yourself, you might have a bit of a learning curve if you’ve not used CSS before, but the benefits outweigh the other, outdated options.

A note about Flash: for SEO purposes, it’s best to avoid Flash still.  Advances are being made in its indexation, but it’s still a bit touch and go.  For more information on the state of Flash and search engines, check out Adobe’s SEO Technology Center and Brian Ussery’s excellent “2009 Google Flash SEO” and critique of Adobe’s SEO Technology Center posts.

H Tags

You should also make use of H tags (which are part of the code).  These can be used to call attention to specific headings or keywords in the text.  When used well, these tags help to form an outline of your content.  Tags run from H1 to H6, so there’s a fair amount of room to assign headers or content divisions different H tags, depending on how important.  As always, save your H1 tag for the most important header on the page, usually at the very top of the content.  Also, don’t overuse the tags, otherwise their value to the page may become diluted if everything on the page seems to have the same level of importance.  If you’re bumping up against this problem, consider breaking your content across multiple pages.

Images

Despite the focus on text on a website, images are still very important.  In fact, image optimization is critical to your site.  Why let your great photos and other images fall by the wayside, simply because you ignored their optimization potential?  Because search engines can’t “read” or “see” what’s in a picture, you need to provide text for them that the search engines can read: ALT attributes.

For example, the ALT attribute for the picture above is “Microsoft source code by stefanoost, on Flickr.” In this instance, the ALT attribute says that the image is of Microsoft’s source code and that it was made by sefanoost and found on Flickr.  If the image is of your company logo, you could use an ALT tag that says “Company X, Maker of Fine Gizmos and Gadgets.”  Likewise, if your image is of an example of waterjet cutting you did, you would want to put something like “Waterjet cut aluminum gaskets.”

Not only do ALT attributes provide text for the search engines to find, giving them clues to what the image is, they also help out website visitors, especially those using screen readers or who have images turned off in their browsers.  For more information on the importance of ALT attributes and website accessibility for those using screen readers, check out WebAim’s article “Creating Accessible Images”.

Filer names are another element of images that can be optimized for the search engines.  Instead of a generic file name like “0000342.jpg, ” use something specific like “waterjet-cut-aluminum-gaskets.jpg.”  These file extensions are read by the search engines, so don’t lose out on any opportunity to guide them in the right direction.  You’ll also have the added bonus of keeping your images better organized on your end if you can tell what it is just by looking at the file name. (Related: If you’re posting your images to a site such as Flickr as well, give them optimized image names too!)

Source code, H tags, and images are just a few more ways that you can optimize your website for the search engines.  Notice that there’s not real differentiation here concerning languages or countries.  This is because basic SEO techniques are applicable to all websites, wherever they may be on the Internet.  Good SEO is good SEO no matter where you practice it.  Just remember to do your optimization in the language(s) most appropriate for your target audience(s).

Photo by Stefanoost under Creative Commons.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 9:57 am and is filed under International Internet Marketing, International SEO, Website Content. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.