SEO (13) Body text And Menu Bar

Body text

Search engines tend to like unadulterated HTML code. The term adulteration is used in context of embedded JavaScript code, Flash movies and Image files. Search engines do not attempt to read these contents even though they might contain significant density of keywords within them. An example is the logo image on the website which in most case state the domain name and the caption. The caption may represent a keyword oriented phrase much similar to the title of the web page but since this information cannot be read by the search engines, it cannot be accounted to determine the relevancy of the web page. Simply put, “What a search engine cannot see does not exist on the web page”. This may or may not be true for human visitors but is certainly a rule adhered by the search engine spider. Flash text can only be read by FAST Alltheweb.com. None of the other search engines can read flash text or follow flash links. Similar to flash files is JavaScript code embedded within the HTML files. Most search engines ignore JavaScript code and links within this code [10]. Another factor to consider is the keywords appearing in the “Above the fold” region of a webpage. The higher the keyword density in this region, the more relevant the web page is for a given keyword.

With these factors in mind, one can adapt the strategies outlined below to optimize body text:

1. Include JavaScript code as a separate file. This can be done using the following HTML tag.

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript&<LINK href="myStyleSheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">quot; SRC="myJavaScript.js"></SCRIPT>

2. Minimize usage of Flash movies

3. Always use ALT attribute in IMG tags. The HTML IMG tag is

<img src="myImage.gif" alt="My Image" />

Style sheets are incorporated in almost every web page to enhance the visual appearance of the web page. This might entice the visitor since one will find the appearance of the web page more appealing compared to plain HTML, but for a search engine spider, style sheets are unrelated text in the “Above the Fold” region. The web page content can be optimized by including the style sheet file over embedding the style sheet code using the LINK HTML tag:

<LINK href="myStyleSheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

Heading tags also play a very important role in the content of a web page. It is advisable to embed keywords in bold face within H1 to H6 tags with preference given to H1 tag over H6 tag as 1 through 6 determines the importance of the heading. Font faces like bold, italic and underline determine relative importance of text and should be used wherever applicable in conjunction with key phrases. A typical webpage may have keyword rich content with at least 200-250 words of text

Menu bar

Menu bar in a webpage link to the most important pages on the site. Since almost every page on the site contains menu, they vote for the pages linked by the menu bar. This increases link popularity of these pages within the website. These pages should have good targeted content and adhere to the linking guidelines discussed in the Sitemap section below. This may result in higher ranking for these pages.

source:SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING by Binoy Varghese page 28-29

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