Create Web pages that can be easily found and referenced by search engines.
<title>...</title>
The title of a page is the most important element for searching. Use a succinct, unique description of the page. Word order is not important. The maximum title length (including spaces) is 80 characters.
<body>...</body>
Include the best content for users in the body text (main text) of the document. Search engines index the words in the body so results are ranked by placement, font, and number of occurrences.
<head>...</head>
Review and embed the recommended metadata elements from the
Metadata for Websites into the section of an XHTML/HTML Webpage.
Tips: Word order is not important. Do not exceed 1,000 characters (including spaces), use commas or words such as of, the, or and. These words take up space and most search engines ignore them.
Advanced tools associated with search engines will report on queries or terms used that did not return a result. These reports can be an excellent tool to discover questions, phrases, or misspelled words that may not be expected, but which users want to use to find site content.
Portable Document Format (PDF)
Add document properties in Portable Document Format (PDF) documents. Include the title, author, subject, and keyword fields. These properties serve the same functions as meta tags in HTML documents.
Headers, footers
Most Web pages are designed to have a consistent header, side or media bar, and/or footer. The text in these sections is of little value to search technologies.
While there are no known standards for logically separating header and footer content from the main body, it may be useful to adopt a tagging standard so that configurable search engines can be consistently informed about site conventions.
Consider using a custom tag (elements enclosed in angle brackets) such as <mainbody>...</mainbody> to signal the beginning and end of the page content. The unknown tags will be ignored by the browser.
In the absence of custom tags, consistency is key. Smarter search technologies will be able to negate the effect of headers and footers as long as they are consistently presented.
Styles
Better search technologies will look for as many hints as possible to help refine the weight applied to a word. Text in bold, italics, headings or other similar styles may be given more weight than others. The Ask George Search and other search engines can use these cues to dynamically select the most appropriate Title and Abstract.
Page size
Search engines create an association between words and documents (URLs). Fewer documents will produce fewer selections when performing a search. On the other hand, too much granularity makes the site hard to navigate and maintain.
As a general rule create documents that can be printed on no more than two to three pages. Otherwise consider beginning a new page for additional content.
Language and character set
Advanced search engines will recognize language and character set, and will respond appropriately, including the ability to search by language within the site.
Tag pages (or configure the Web server to send back appropriate headers) to indicate the character set and primary language even if the site is all in one language. This is especially important for sites with multiple language content, and even more when there are common elements (headers, footers, and other boilerplate material) in the primary language, but with the content in another.
Page branding and upward navigation
Brand all pages and include upward navigation to aid users who discover a page via an external search engine.