Recently I was able to visit my company’s new server room. It was for a routine upgrade which someone else was handling, so I was able to get some video footage of our floor:
There are three main security checkpoints before anyone can even get to the door of the room! We definitely put the secure in Tech Secure 411!
Links don’t have to be complicated; if you’re only putting them where they feel right, you can do fairly well. However, eventually you will discover (or you already have discovered) the importance of anchor text (a link titled “click here” isn’t so great compared to a link using words related to what you’re linking to) and that may cause you to place links in a manner which either looks weird to readers or is too much from an SEO standpoint.
Placement is similar: As soon as you discover that things that appear first in the code are seen as more important than things that appear at the end of it, you may try to stick a few more links in the top of your page, or try some CSS tricks to move links which appear early in the code down to the bottom of the page so it appears normal to visitors but important to a web crawler. These tricks tend to backfire, especially when put up against Google, the most well-known search engine.
Links which appear in the header tend to be more important, but should point to main points of a site, such as the home page, the index of a forum, or the main page of a section of your site such as a help section or blog. The <h1> may declare important text, but be careful when using the <h1> anchor tag within it; it may sacrifice page value to raise the value of what is linked to within those <h1> tags.
The content is where more precise links are found. Since the content is what the page is about, generally not repeated, and what the user’s attention is drawn to, search engines see one link here as important and contextually accurate. Linking to something once will be of great benefit to the destination of said link, but the diminishing returns of linking in the content make linking to something less effective than a link that appears frequently in a header of footer.
The footer is similar to the header since both tend to be the same across a section of the site, but since it’s at the end of the code and usually not observed much by users, it has the least link strength. It’s best to do what you usually see in footers of other sites: put links to basic content which may be only viewed once per user such as a privacy policy, copyright information, and designer credit. Search engines don’t expect a link to show up here once or twice across the site, so it’s likely to see it as an error or black hat spam rather than a legitimate link.
Although this is a fairly general rule, there are exceptions for some sites due to unique content or styles, but most people with a blog, forum, article-style content, image galleries, and the like will find this technique useful.
You can get an introduction to the power and potential of PHP coding by performing this practice coding technique, which only uses the “include” php command. For this example, we’ll pretend to build a simple personal site, which assumes you want every page to be pretty much the same, except for the content.
First, you create a .php file with the basics of the code: Doctype, the <head>, the <body>, and within the body you write a header, a blank navigation bar, a paragraph about yourself and a footer. You add CSS to give it that look you want, but you decide you want to expand. This is where includes come in.
We’ll start right at the beginning with the Doctype. You know you want the same Doctype for every page, and after that there are the <HTML> and <head> tags which will appear on every page as well. Cut this out of the original document and call it something you can easily identify, like “start.html”. Where it used to be in your original PHP document, put the code <?php include(“start.html”); ?> (assuming you’re going to upload both files to the same directory).
The next section is for the meta tags, but now you have to decide what will be best to keep in a file where it will all be the same, and what will have to be changed around for every page you make. Lets say you want to make other pages for your hobbies, your pet, and your travel photos. The title will have to change every time, so keep that out. Your stylesheet, however, is something which will appear on every page (assuming you want them all to look similar) so the code calling for your .css file will go in our next file. Let’s call it “meta.html” for this example. Again, in the place of your old code, put <?php include(“meta.html”); ?>.
Now we’ll move on to the content your visitors will see. You’ll need a header for every page, so you take your <H1> tag information and put it in another html file (example: “h1.html”) and move on to the next area, the navigation bar (example: “navigation.html”). Because one comes right after the other, you may call for both of them in one php command (like this: <?php include(“h1.html”); include(“navigation.html”); ?>). They aren’t in the same file because you may want to move the navigation later (for example, above the header or in the footer) or get rid of it on certain pages.
The next area will be the most unique part of the document, so it will be left as basic code. It will contain dividers, paragraphs, images, and other content that will differ from page to page. Finally, the footer (example: “foot.htm”) will be added using includes, and the last tags (<body> and <html>) will be closed.
There you go! All you have to do is build pages using those php include codes and you’ll be able to quickly make any changes you want later. Recently, having a “start.html” helped me quickly change my site to HTML5 (which required a Doctype change). If you need to add a new link in the navigation due to an additional page, you’ll only need to change one file (in this example, “navigation.html”) instead of editing every page on your site.
Keyword density is one of those things that seems to make sense when you think about how important something is in an article. It shows up in the <h1> tags? It must be important. Mentioned three times in the article? It’s staying on topic, and this is good. To some, using a keyword more often would naturally appear to be a ladder to search ranking or SERP success, but fortunately this is not the case, and you can make the level so dense that it will hurt your rankings rather than help.
This is one of those rare situations where additional work is not necessarily a good thing. If you just write your article like you’re speaking naturally to someone, the keyword density will optimize itself, and it’s better for your readers that way, too. There is no recommended keyword density; the best practice is to not be redundant.
Hello various readers, this is Stephen Brand, webmaster of this domain and a handful of others, and lead web designer at Tech Secure 411. Here I will discuss various things about web design and related topics.
