This page contains part of a report that we prepared for a customer who wanted to know exactly how we would optimise their main page to be attractive to the search engines.  We have modified it a little to conceal their identity but otherwise it is typical of the reports that we write when quoting to optimise a site.

Frames

The front page of your web site uses a technique called frames, which essentially shows web pages within other web pages. Although this can marginally improve the look to the human viewer, many search engines (including some of the most important) are currently unable to read and recognise the text within the frame page. In turn, this means that frames pages rank extremely badly on search engines. In addition, some older computers do not support frames so their users are unable to view your site. We would get around these problems by reconfiguring your main pages into tables and/or borders, which would preserve the look of the page without using the frames technique. This would make our work more efficient in the long run but, if you wished to retain the frames pages we could work on the ‘noframes page’, which is not normally seen by the human viewer.

Title

The title of your main page (‘Our Services’, which to the human observer appears only in small print at the very top of the window) does not contain words that one would generally consider to be the main keywords. These are words that people might use with a search engine to find the content on your web site, unless they already knew of your existence. It is important to use as many keywords as possible in the title (for example, ‘A-products’, ‘B-items’, and ‘C-services’); how many words should be used depends on the search engine. We would amend the title of your main page to include appropriate keywords.

Meta Tags - Keywords

Your site does not use a keywords ‘metatag’. These tags are not normally visible to a human viewer, but they are used by some search engines to take account of what words the designers consider to be of prime importance to the users when searching on a particular subject. Without these guiding metatags, the search engines have to make their own, perhaps less accurate, judgments; the only words on your main (or default) page are "This page is designed for use with a browser that supports frames", which does not tell the search engines what the site is about. We would add a keywords metatag to your main page.

Meta Tags - Description

Your site does not use a description metatag. Alta Vista (a major search engine) uses a description to describe the site’s contents in its list of results to the user of the Alta Vista search engine. Other search engines also use this technique and also rank sites higher if the keywords are listed in the description area. We would include a description metatag to your main page.

Heading Text

Some search engines give a higher relevance score to sites where the keyword appears in a heading. A heading is a specific style of text within HTML - the language used to write web sites. Your site does not have keywords in heading areas so we would add keywords within headings in your main page.

Hyperlink URL

The filenames and URL links, which go from the main page, could be optimised so that the filenames themselves incorporate keywords, where feasible. This technique is not always possible, but is one that we would look at when optimising your site.

Link text

Where you have links to other pages, the text at these links are not necessarily relevant words. Some search engines consider this link text to be more relevant than normal text so we would put keywords into this link text to raise the relevance ranking of your site with respect to these keywords.

Alt Area Text

Pictures and symbols on web pages can have some text associated with them, called alt text. If you roll your mouse onto the image to the left, in Internet Explorer a small amount of text will appear, this is the alt text. Your page does not, or merely uses the filename associated with the object. Some engines will consider this alt text when assessing the relevance of a site. Additionally, viewers can see this text if the mouse pointer rests over the image, which gives them more understanding of the link or the relevance of the picture. We would add or amend text in the alt area to incorporate your keywords.

Body Text

As your site is based on frames, the main body text of the main (default) page does not contain any keywords at all; this usually means that your keywords will never be picked up by the search engines. Optimisation of the number of keywords is a ‘moveable feast’ but we would optimise the number and placement of keywords in the body text according to the industry’s prevailing knowledge of the search engine algorithms.