content="sugarbeat, sugar, beat, music, children,
musical, classes, movement, babies, infants, kids, child, creative" />
The keyword list is a great place to add important terms (like “horseback riding”), alternate spellings (“horse back riding”), synonyms or related words (“equestrian”), and even common misspellings (“ecquestrian”). Keywords aren’t case-sensitive.
Unfortunately, there’s a huge caveat here. Most search engines don’t use the keyword list any longer. That’s because it was notorious for abuses (many a webmaster stuffed his keyword list full of hundreds of words, some only tangentially related to what was actually on the site). Search engines like Google take a more direct approach—they look at all the words in your web page, and pay special attention to words that appear more often, appear in headings, and so on. Most web experts argue that the keyword list has outlived its usefulness, and many don’t bother adding it to their pages at all.
DESIGN TIME
The Importance of Titles and Image Text
A search engine draws information from many parts of your page, not just the meta elements. To make sure your pages are search-engine-ready, you should check to make sure you use the
element in all your pages, and that you use alternate text with all your images.
Alternate image text is the text a browser displays if it can’t retrieve an image. You specify this text using the alt attribute in the
element. Search engines pay attention to the alternate text—for example, Google, uses it as the basis for its image-searching tool ( http://images.google.com/ ). If you don’t have alt text, Google has to guess what the picture is about by looking at nearby text, which is less reliable.
The element also plays several important roles. You already know that it determines the text your browser displays in the title bar of the browser window. It also helps identify your Web page in a listing of search results (see Figure 1-3 , shown earlier). Finally, the element contains the text that appears in the bookmarks menu if a visitor bookmarks your page. Keep that in mind, and refrain from adding long slogans. “Ketchup Crusaders—Because ketchup isn’t just for making food tasty” is about the longest you can stretch a title, and even that’s iffy. On the other hand, remember not to omit essential information. The title “Welcome” or “Untitled 1” (a favorite in the Expression Web design program) isn’t very helpful.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Keyword Tricks
Can I make my website more popular by adding hidden keywords ?
There are quite a few unwholesome tricks that crafty Web weavers use to game the search engine system (or at least try). For example, they might add a huge number of keywords, but hide the text so it isn’t visible on the page (white text on a white background is one oddball option, but there are other style-sheet tricks). Another technique is to create pages that aren’t really a part of your website, but that you store on your server. You can fill these pages with repeating keyword text. To implement this trick, you use a little JavaScript code to make sure real people who accidentally arrive at the page are directed to the entry point of your website, while search engines get to feast on the keywords.
As seductive as some of these tricks may seem to lonely websites (and their owners), the best advice is to avoid them altogether. The first problem is that they pose a new set of headaches and technical challenges, which can waste hours of your day. But more significantly, search engines learn about these tricks almost as fast as Web developers invent them. If a search engine catches you using these tricks, it may ban your site completely, relegating it to the dustbin of the Web.
If you’re still tempted, keep this in mind: Many of these tricks just don’t work. In the early days of the Web, primitive search engines gave a site more