Head First HTML with CSS

#7 Tuning for Search Engines
Many users will find your site through search engines (like Google and Yahoo!). In some cases you
may not want your site to be listed in the search engine rankings, and you can use XHTML to
request that they not be listed. But, in other cases, you’ll want to do everything you can to tune your
site so it appears high in the rankings when particular terms are searched for. Here are some general
tips for improving the search engine results for your pages. But keep in mind that every search
engine works differently and each considers different factors when deciding the order of its rankings.
Improving your rankings
Search engines use a combination of the words and phrases in your pages in their search rankings.
To improve your rankings and help search engines determine what your page is about, start with two
tags in your element: one to list keywords and the other to provide a description
of your content. A keyword is a simple word or two that describes your site, like “coffee” or “travel
journal”.
Many search engines treat the words in your headings and the alt and title attributes with more
weight than the rest of your text, so be sure to write concise and meaningful text in these elements
and attributes.
Finally, many search engines factor in the number of links to your site from other sites; the more sites
that link to you, the more important your site must be. So, anything you can do to encourage others
to link to your site can improve your search engine rankings.
How do I keep my site from being listed?
You can request that search engines ignore your pages, but there is no guarantee that all of them will.
The only way to truly prevent others from finding your site is to make it private (discuss that with your
hosting company). But if you want to request that your site not be listed, which works with most of the
major search engines, just put a tag in the head of your XHTML, like this:
This meta tag tells search engines
to ignore this page, and any other
pages on the same site that this
page happens to link to.
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