Préparer votre site pour SEO

Partie 2: Preparing your website for Search Engine Optimisation. 

I’ve already mentioned that spiders ‘crawl’ links, but the most important factor to note is that search engines spiders cannot (currently) ‘read’ content within flash. So if your web site is all flash (cursor over the content and right click, if one of the items on the right click menu is ‘About Adobe Flash’ then it’s likely your whole site is built in flash), forget it, my advice is to get it re-built in html and only use flash for small elements where necessary. And if your navigation is built in flash, equally you’re going to have problems unless you build an html site map as the spider will struggle to move deeper into your site than the home page as it would normally find the other pages via your navigation.

This is important, because the more pages you have in the search engines’ index, the more likely you are to be found (like many things, sometimes it’s a numbers game). Many people think only about their homepage when they think about getting found in search engines. The trick is to think about the importance of EVERY page on your site. So here’s a list of ‘data sets’ I believe the spider will look at when it visits your web site’s pages: 

1. The page title (the bit that appears in the blue bar at the top of your browser window).
    
2. The domain name (i.e. giteguru.com)
    
3. The page name (the bit at the end of the domain name ie /preparing-your-site-for-seo.html
    
4. The document title or ‘header’ (this is the title at the beginning of the page ‘document’, in this instance ‘Preparing your site for SEO’)
    
5. The body text (the rest of the text in the content area of the page)
    
6. Image names and ‘alt tags’ 

Note that i’ve not included ‘mot-clé’ meta data or ‘description’ meta data, which are factors many people often associate with good SEO practice. For the uninitiated, meta data is information which is stored in the source code of a web page, but which doesn’t appear actually on the visible page. If you use your browser to view > page source, you’ll often see meta data information in the top 20 or so lines of source code for the page. À mon avis, whilst it’s worth adding ‘description’ meta data (as this sometimes shows up as the text under the URL in the search results, and can be written more compellingly than the actual content of the page), most search engines now ignore this meta data when deciding on what the site is about, because meta data was being so heavily abused by SEO companies to try to manipulate their clients search rankings for irrelevant search terms. 

En outre, old concepts such as ‘keyword stuffing’ which involves hiding keywords in the page (usually by using the same colour for the text and the background) are easily spotted and penalised by search engines. These and other ’black hat’ methods of trying to cheat the search engines are pointless in the long run as they risk getting you permanently banned from the search engines so we’re sticking to the ‘white hat’ honest methods here. 

What does the search engine LOOK FOR?

The search engine is looking at the ‘data sets’ for keywords it thinks best describes what each web page is about. This is important, because what it means that you can optimise EACH PAGE for a different search term. For example, you might dedicate a whole page or section on your web site to things to do in the local area, as this may help your site to be found on searches relating to your geographical location. You might optimise one page to talk about gites, another to talk about cottage rentals, another to talk about weekends away, etc. You get the point. As a rule of thumb, try to ensure that your target search term is included in 1, 3, 4, 5 et 6 above. If there’s a specific search term that you REALLY want to be found against, vous pourriez essayer d'acheter et d'utiliser un nom de domaine avec le terme de recherche dans ce, see my article on choosing a domain name for more on that point. 

One mistake I regularly see is people trying to optimise a single page for multiple search queries. This is most obvious when you see a blue page title that looks like this: 

Lovely gite, rent gite in Dordogne, cottages in the dordogne, cottage to rent, find a gite, property rentals. 

If you do this, you’re essentially diluting your search engine optimisation. Stick to one search term per page in your web site and you’ll have more success. Given what I’ve mentioned above, you might decide to add some new pages to your web site. Equally, consider where you want your traffic from. If you want traffic from Germany, you’ll need at least 1 german language page on your web site which is optimised for a german search term. Ditto other languages. Bear in mind these don’t all need to be on your main navigation, but DO need to be linked to from somewhere on your site so that the search spiders can find them. 

Enfin, a word on ‘keyword density’. Some people believe that there is an optimum ‘density’ for your search term within the body text on your page (density being defined as your search words / total number of words on the page). My overall advice would be to ignore this and just write your content naturally. So long as your chosen search term appears a couple of times in the body text of your page, that will be enough for the search engines (and using it too often, or ‘stuffing the page’ with search keywords, will get you penalised by search engines. If you are interested in checking your keyword density, there’s a clever tool here which does a great job of calculating it for you for free: 

http://www.gorank.com/ 

Now that we know how to prepare our sites for SEO, my next post will look at how to ensure your website is found by the search engine’s spiders.

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