Search Engine Optimization Guidelines
by Daria Goetsch
daria@oreilly.com
1. Content: The most important element of search engine optimization is to have good content with text, search engine spiders/robots like text. The ideal is to work your keyword phrases (2-5 word phrases a user would use to search for the page topic you are creating) into your page content.
2. *Meta tags for search engines: title tag, description tag, keywords tag.
A basic rule of thumb is not to repeat any instance of any particular keyword phrase more than three times.
Title meta tag: This the most important meta tag, include "O’Reilly or O’Reilly Network" in it. You may also use one to three keyword phrases. The keyword phrases need to describe the content of your page. If it is a Java Developers site, use this as one of the keyword phrases in the title tag. The title can be aproximately 60 – 150 characters. If you don’t want the title length cut off by some search engines in the search results, stick to 60 (about 10 words - spaces/letters) as a maximum for the title tag. If the title runs longer, some engines simply cut off the remainder of the title in the search results.
The title tag is not really a meta tag but goes hand in hand with the description and keyword tags.
Description tag: The description ideally will be 150-200 characters (about 25 words); it may be more, as this is only a suggested guideline. Do not use sales terminology; instead write a good description of your page including working your keyword phrases from the title tag into the description. The description will sometimes show up as the description in the search engine results.
Keyword tag: The keyword tag is the least important tag at this time. I prefer to include it because you never know when the search engine rules will change again and they will be needed. It is important to use two or three word phrases as this is usually how most searchers search.
You may have up to 1,000 characters for keywords. Again, this is only a suggested guideline. 500 or less is better (about 82 words). Keep all words in this tag lowercase. Start your keywords tag with "o’reilly or o’reilly network". Do not repeat the same keyword phrase. Use variations of the keyword. Example: java developer, java books, java programming, etc. Technically it does not matter if you do or do not use commas. If you use commas to separate the keywords, do not leave a space afterwards as this counts as a character in the total count of characters allowed by the search engine spider.
If possible, repeat the meta description as your first paragraph at the top of the page. If not, work in the keyword phrases into your page. Try not to repeat the specific keyword phrases more than three times in the page.
2. Alt tags: They are helpful for search engine indexing. Describe the graphic. Example: "Dynamic HTML" as the alt text for the book’s graphic, company name in the alt text for the page logo, etc. Create these for the users benefit. If you are able to use the keyword phrase in the alt tag, use it but keep the alt description short and do not repeat more than once.
3. Domain names and page hyperlinks: Whenever possible use the company name and a keyword in the url. Example: http://www.perl.oreilly.com uses the company name and the subject the page is about. This can also be of benefit with hyperlinks. Example: http://java.oreilly.com/news/soap_0900.html can be found in a search for Java and also the topic, SOAP.
Please note: the major search engines and directories often change their rules and database algorithms. There may be changes over a period of time regarding the search engine guidelines set forth above.
*For an example of meta tags and alt tags, check the source code and alt tags at oreilly.com.