Want High Search Engine Rankings? Get Rid of Your Page Clutter!

Want High Search Engine Rankings? Get Rid of Your Page Clutter!

Yahoo recently filed a patent application indicating that search engines might be examining the amount of clutter and the usability of your web pages to help determine your search engine ranking. Google has a patent application called "Detecting and rejecting annoying documents". Yahoo’s application lists a number of factors that search engines can use to help determine the usability and or clutter of a web page.

These factors include things like the size of a page, the number of image ads on a page and how many are above and below the fold. The number of ads of various kinds, the number of ad links, the number of links in general could also be considered. Heck, they can observe the number of tables, the ratios of various things like total words to text links or whatever.

The search engines are pretty smart, and getting smarter all the time. Ultimately the goal of the search engine is to make the searcher happy. And most humans are happier with clean attractive websites that are easy to navigate and where it’s easy to locate what they are looking for.

You’ve seen those pages cluttered with banners and ad text links…even banners that flash! There are so many ads that it’s hard to figure out what the site is about, and it makes navigation difficult. It’s pretty easy to see that with the right algorithms the search engines would be able to spot those cluttered sites and penalize them accordingly.

These days it’s not enough to spell check your pages. Your pages should have proper grammar as well. If Microsoft Word can find poor grammar then the search engines can too. In fact, it would not surprise me at all if the search engines can determine whether or not a page has a layout that is pleasing to the human eye. This could be done by checking to see how many different fonts are being used on the page, and how much size variation there is and where along with the use of bold, underline, italics etc.

There are general rules that apply. For instance, humans like it when there is a nice straight edge somewhere for the eyes to follow. For instance, this article is left justified so there is a nice straight line along the left border. However, if this text were centered on the page, there would be no straight line on the page for your eyes to follow, and it is thus less attractive. Centering text on a page generally indicates the page was built by an amateur.

It’s still my opinion that your best option if you want lots of free organic traffic on a long term basis, then build your pages for humans. Make them as easy to use as possible, and provide the visitors with what they want. You can find plenty of information about SEO online, and by all means find that information and use it. Just don’t try to fool the search engines. Give them what they want, and that is what a human visitor would want. Make that the primary objective.

One of the more exciting ways of squeezing more income out of your website is the new 5 second audio ads. They do not ad any clutter to your page as more banners or links would. They don’t take up any room. When a visitor lands on your page, a 5 second audio ad plays and you get paid. No clicking is necessary. Simple uncluttered additional income for your site. Get paid for every visitor. All you do is add a small piece of javascript code to your page and you are ready to go. It doesn’t interfere with any other program including Adsense. It’s something to think about anyway.

The final ingredient however is one of those things that is very hard to manipulate…time! It just plain takes a long time to gain the trust of Google, and that is where you want to be. After you finish your site, be prepared to wait a year or more before you can get loads of free search engine traffic. You may get a trickle, but the torrents will take awhile. If you’ve done your job, it will be well worth the effort.