[thelist] Search Engines

[Joel D Canfield]

Hey Martin - just curious if this plan really works. You're the voice of
experience, not theory, right? Most folks seem to insist that SE
rankings are based on the infinite efforts of specialists. I've always
thought it should be as simple as you describe, but don't have enough
experience with commercial sites to know. 

Re: alt text on spacers - you're saying 'put in the alt text tag, but
leave it empty' right?

joel at spinhead.com

-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of
martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Sent: Thursday, November 22, 2001 2:10 AM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: Re: [thelist] Search Engines



Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

-------------------- Start of message text --------------------

[ . . . ] 

To make your site search engine-friendly is pretty simple:
1) Be what your audience is looking for (ie have good content)

2) Make sure that the SE spider can understand what your content is
about
    by parsing the text. So mark everything up with semantic HTML (ie
<h1>
    rather than <p class="bigbold">), make sure that your pages have
clear,
    simple titles which say what the page is about, alt-text every image
apart from
    spacers.

3) Pursuade people to link to your site (does wonders for the Google
ranking)

4) Don't, don't, don't feed content to the SE which users can't see.
This includes
    text the same colour as the background and server-side tricks (known
as cloaking).
    These things *will* get you removed from SE indices.

Cheers
Martin


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