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optimize my menu links for search engines 1

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knuckle05

knuckle05

Programmer
Dec 17, 2001
247
CA
Hi All,

For those with a little knowledge of SEO, here's a quick question.

From what I've read, it seems that the links you have on your site to the other pages on your site, influence search engines in giving you a better rank.

Currently, my menu links are all displayed via an include file. Will this be picked up by a search engine, or crawler, or do I need to explicitly put these links on each of my pages.

Thx for your time. The site in question is
 
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Anchor Text within your site has some effect on results but not a huge amount, Anchor Text on inbound links can have a greater effect. There over 100 items that make up Googles ranking algo and similar numbers with most of the other crawler based engines.

There are far more methods to get better placing in the SERPs and ones that you can have far greater control over than inbound links. Links will get you Google PageRank. Good optimization will get results!
SSI is fine for navigation menus because it is included before the page is served to the browser/spider.

The biggest problems you will have for your site is the mass of javascript at the top of the pages, and the HTML errors that are there, try validating your pages. Also because you are using SSI there are several opening <html><head><body> tags along with their closing counterparts, Some of the spiders may well stop parsing the document on the first </html> tag encountered.
shtml Include files should only have body content and the <html> etc tags should be in the main document to avoid this happening.

Google has 50 pages indexed and looking at them in the results not one of them tells me what you do! This is because your content is buried deep in the page under that JS code.

Pages need to be optimised to show at a glance what you are selling or promoting. this site has only been up around 8 weeks but the SERPs title and info snippet do say what the site is about and it has brought in one sales lead already.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
 
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Hi Chris, thanks for the great tips!!

I will be modifying the site with your recomendations....

We'll see in a few weeks if it results in some more positive search results.

Thx

Mike
 
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Chris,

EVen though its not as important, could you show me an example of whar you mean by Anchor Text ?
 
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<a href="pagename">This is Anchor Text</a>

What the Anchor Text should to be is a keyword/keyphrase that relates to the linked page so a page about pink widgets would (ideally) be linked with,

<a href="pw.htm">Pink Widgets</a>



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?
 
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A handy tool is - it lets you see your page the way a spider sees it, without images or Javascript gewgaws. Yours looks OK, though there's room for improvement.

Do you really need all that Javascript? Does the site really look so broken in NS4 that you need an acre of JS just to check for and exclude users of that browser? If so, then at least move the scripts into a seperate file or files - so they get cached on the user's browser, and don't obscure the actual content of the page when you're looking at the source. It can help your SEO too.

-- Chris Hunt
 
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