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. With all that
clutter it's pretty doubtful they would achieve high search engine
rankings.
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.
The final
ingredient for high search engine rankings 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.
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