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you also increase the competition for use of those keywords. When this happens, other pages containing the same keywords dilute your position within search rankings. There are also rumors that some search engines ignore web pages that have excessive numbers of keywords as a measure to avoid keyword spamming, or the overuse of keywords. Whether these rumors are true or not, it still makes sense to use fewer, but better quality, keywords. For this reason, there is usually no need to include regular plurals[72] in keywords.

Note

The more unique your keywords are, the higher your web page will rank in search results when people use those keywords in web searches. Once thing to watch out for is when your keyword is part of another, longer word. For example, I once worked for a company called Entolo. We had difficulty getting decent rankings on search engines because the word Entolo is a subset of the word Scientology (sciENTOLOgy). Since there were many more heavily linked web pages dedicated to Scientology, our website seldom registered highly with any search services.

Header Tags

In addition to making web pages easier to read, header tags help search engines identify and locate important content on web pages. For example, consider the example in Listing 26-4.

North American Wire Packaging

In North America, large amounts of wire are commonly shipped on spools...

Listing 26-4: Using header tags to identify key content on a web page

In the past, web designers strayed from using header tags because they only offer a small availability of font selections. But now, with the wide acceptance of style sheets, there is no reason not to use HTML header tags to describe important sections of your web pages.

Image alt Attributes

Long ago, before everyone had graphical browsers, web designers used the alt attribute of the HTML tag to describe images to people with text-based browsers. Today, with the increasing popularity of image search tools, the alt attribute helps search engines interpret the content of images, as shown below in Listing 26-5.

Listing 26-5: Using the alt attribute to identify the content of an image

* * *

[72] A regular plural is the singular form of a word followed by the letter s.

Web Design Techniques That Hinder Search Engine Spiders

There are common web design techniques that inhibit search engine spiders from properly indexing web pages. You don't have to avoid using these techniques altogether, but you should avoid using them in situations where they obscure links and ASCII text from search engine spiders. There is no single set of standards or specifications for SEO. Search engine companies also capriciously change their techniques for compiling search results. The concepts mentioned here, however, are a good set of suggestions for you to consider as you develop your own best practice policies.

JavaScript

Since most webbots and spiders lack JavaScript interpreters, there is no guarantee that a spider will understand hyper-references made with JavaScript. For example, the second hyper-reference in Listing 26-6 stands a far better chance of being indexed by a spider than the first one.

<-- Example of a non-optimized hyper-reference -->

<-- Example of an easy-to-index hyper-reference -->

My home page

Listing 26-6: JavaScript links are hard for search spiders to interpret.

Non-ASCII Content

Search engine spiders depend on ASCII characters to identify what's on a web page. For that reason, you should avoid presenting text in images or Flash movies. It is particularly important not to design your website's navigation scheme in Flash, because it will not be visible outside of the Flash movie, and it will be completely hidden from search pages. Not only will your Flash pages fail to show up in search results, but other pages will also not be able to deep link directly