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Optimizing Content for Search

Search engines visit Web pages, index the words on those pages, and put the pages into a database. When a user does a search, the search engine compares the user's search terms against the pages in its database to find pages that contain the user's search terms.

Requirements

Work with the EERE Search Specialist early in the writing process to determine strategies and a process for optimization.

Best Practices

Here are some ways to optimize your content so your pages will rank higher and display properly in search results:

  • Determine key terms—Develop a list of terms (singular and plural) that describe what your content is about. Your list should include terms users will use to search for that content in search engines, and appropriate synonyms, acronyms, and abbreviations. Good sources of terms include your statistics and your search logs.

  • Position key terms on page—Your key terms should be used in the first 150-200 characters of text on your page (including spaces), as well as in your header text (which is also used in the title tag). Be sure your page header is text-based, not graphical. For the rest of the text, you should plan to use your key terms three times for every 100 words (don't go overboard, or search engines might suspect you of "spamming"). In addition, your key terms should be placed close together (i.e. "geothermal heat pumps").

  • Use H1-H5 HTML code for header text—Some search engines will rank your pages higher if your header text is in "H" headers in your HTML code, instead of using font and bold tags or other styles.

  • Watch your page size—Some search engines don't index pages longer then 1 MB.

  • Optimize your PDFs and other downloadable documents—You can also optimize the titles and meta data for your PDFs and other downloadable documents to help your documents rank high and display well in search engine results. Read more about optimizing PDFs and other downloadable documents.

  • Don't use text-based breadcrumbs or left navigation—Because of the way pages are coded, your left navigation and breadcrumbs can appear to be the first content on your page — so the search engine will display those words in search result summaries and count those words highly when indexing your page. You can circumvent this problem by making your navigation and breadcrumbs graphical (or by using javascript breadcrumbs).

  • Spell out "&" as "and" in header text, page content, title tags/page titles, and alt tags. — It is okay to use ampersands in graphical text such as navigation, but use "and" in the alt tag. Ampersands in commonly used acronymns like "R&D" should be left as ampersands in all cases.

  • Avoid using acronyms unless the search specialist has identified them as common search terms. For search optimization, it's typically best to spell out terms, such program names and technology-related terms. Some organizations could use the same acronyms for something completely different.

Related Optimization Information