~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Laurie Crawford
Dear Jill and Heather
I am using Microsoft Publisher to set up my site. However I can not
understand how to insert my keyword rich copy within it in such away
it will be readily accessible to search engines. Can you help me on
this?
Laurie Crawford
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Laurie,
With regards to Microsoft Publisher and creating search engine
friendly Web sites, what comes to my mind is simply a great big "UGH"!
I've had my share of clients who come to me with sites that were
"designed" using Publisher, and they are, in fact, the worst examples
of HTML coding I have ever, ever seen. Each and every site that I've
seen has had to have the HTML code totally reworked by hand. Back in
the old days when I had more time on my hands, I would go in and do
this for clients. Now I simply will not accept a Publisher designed
site, and will insist that the client redesign the site using proper
HTML. Proper Web site design is absolutely crucial to getting high
rankings in the search engines. If you follow all of our advice, but
have an incorrectly designed site, you could be shooting yourself in
the foot.
Here're just a few of the things that Publisher does that make for a
terrible design and a search engine unfriendly site:
* It often turns readable body text into a graphic, thus rendering
the copy unreadable to the search engines.
* It usually adds tons and tons of excessive and unneeded table tags
and other useless garbage into the HTML code that can slow down or
stop search engine spiders in their tracks. This in turn could make
any readable body text unreadable to the spiders.
* It usually turns the left hand navigational graphic buttons into
one large graphic, as opposed to a series of buttons. This gives you
less of a chance to use keyword-rich image alt tags, which can
sometimes boost search engine rankings.
* It names the HTML files things like "page1.html," "page2.html" etc.
It never hurts to name your files with keyword specific file names,
e.g., "keyword1.htm" "keyword2.htm." This is not a biggie, but
hey...every bit helps! (It also renames your images in a similar
fashion, e.g., "img1.jpg," "img2.jpg.")
* If you're using the same logo or other graphics on multiple pages
of the site, Publisher creates a new graphic image for each page
instead of using the same image. Thus making load time much longer
for secondary pages, because the images are not being called from the
cache. This is not a search engine problem, but a dumb feature
nonetheless.
Now, there may be ways of stopping these bad things from happening
when creating a site with Publisher, but the bottom line is that
Publisher was not really programmed to be a Web site creation tool.
Yes, it can convert documents into Web sites, but DON'T use it for
this. I cannot stress this enough. It's extremely important to use
the right tools for any job. Publisher is NOT the right tool to
create a search engine friendly Web site. I strongly suggest that
you start from scratch with another tool, or learn some HTML and try
to clean up the mess that Publisher has undoubtedly made to your site.
(In the past, I found it quicker to simply start from scratch...that's
how bad of a mess Publisher makes. Can you tell yet that I don't like
it?) If you're looking for an easy-to-use Web page creation tool,
Microsoft's Front Page is *much* more suited to the task. Older
versions had many of the problems mentioned for Publisher. However, I
understand that newer versions of Front Page can easily create search
engine friendly Web sites, with a minimal understanding of HTML.
Here's a news flash for you - If you really want to be good at search
engine optimization, you absolutely MUST have a basic grasp of HTML
coding. There are so many little tweaks that you can do to your HTML
code that may give you a boost in the search engines. If you're
dependent upon Publisher or even Front Page or any other WYSIWYG (What
You See Is What You Get) tool, you'll never truly be excellent at SEO.
Oh no...you certainly won't! Look for tools that are HTML editors,
such as HomeSite. I still use my old 7-year-old version of Web Edit,
but I don't believe it's available any more. (Holy cow...has it
really been 7 years?)
For more information on designing great search engine friendly Web
sites, I highly suggest that you sign up for Audette Media's I-Design
e-mail discussion list, which is moderated by our Rank Write Web designer and good friend, Shirley Kaiser of www.skdesigns.com. There's a ton of helpful advice in every
issue and also in their archives.
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
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