Website Optimisation 2: A Clinical Approach - The Head

 (Published Article EzineArticles.com)

The head of a webpage is the control centre area of the coding that signals the way viewers see the page in their browser. It must be distinguished from the header which is an area, usually an image, at the top of the webpage when visualised with a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Search engines and human audiences.

Websites have effectively two audiences. The first is the human visitors or traffic to the website and the second is the search engine 'spiders' or 'robots.' The head area provides crucial information in the coding for the benefit of the spiders. These spiders crawl the web looking for new webpages and changes to currently indexed web pages.

For those unfamiliar with webpage coding, you can see it for any webpage you are browsing by placing the cursor on a plain area of the page and right clicking. This will bring up an option to visualise the page source.

The HEAD tag is located at the top of the coding of the webpage, and is closed immediately before the opening BODY tag. All tags are contained within angled brackets. Nothing in the head area is displayed in the webpage as seen with the browser.

Page Title tag.

The most important tag in on-page optimisation is the page TITLE tag which is situated in the head area; it should include the main keywords of the page. Keywords that are not included in this tag are very unlikely to achieve top positioning for that webpage on the search engines. The content of the TITLE tag is displayed in the browser bar at the top of the user's web browser but not in the page itself. The HomePage (index page) receives a boost in positioning power from Google so that the HomePage Page Title is the most valuable real-estate on the website. The search engines index up to 65 characters and so the keywords chosen need to be carefully thought through.

META tags.

The META tags are also located in the head area. The META description is the most important META tag. The keywords contained in this tag are not believed to have a direct initial effect on positioning on search engine results pages (SERPs). However the search engines, such as Google, display the page TITLE and a snippet of text containing the keywords that match a search request. The first place looked at for the snippet is the META Description. A well thought through META Description will influence the click-through-rate and over time this will influence the positioning of a webpage on the search engine results pages and possibly other webpages from the website for their keywords.

The META keywords tag has been abused over the years by keyword stuffing and is no longer of any importance to the search engines and therefore for website optimisation. There are many META tags such as for the author of a webpage but these have no importance in terms of optimisation.

Head Links - CSS - Text: Code Ratio.

The most useful link in the head area from the coding point of view is for CSS. The link typically has an href=" and includes.css". The css is an abbreviation for cascading style sheet. CSS is a set of codes that instruct browsers on how to present text and tables for example. It may include font type, bold text and positioning of text. CSS is cascading because the overall instructions tend to be in a css file with a link to it. A change to this file code will affect every page on the website that has a link to it. There may be specific CSS instructions for an individual page sited in the head area indicated by 'style'. This will override the CSS file.

CSS has two potential advantages for coders. Firstly, it allows one change to be made that can affect every page of a website. Secondly it has the potential to reduce the code required for every page and therefore increase the text: code ratio.

The text: code ratio affects time to load a page and the size of the website when indexed on the search engines. This provides one example demonstrating how optimisation changes over relatively short time spans. Broadband has become increasingly popular and it reduces download times for users. Data storage costs have fallen to the point of hardly needing consideration. Ten years ago, reducing the code size of a webpage from 30k to 20k could have benefit to users, search engines and therefore optimisation. Nowadays, it will make minimal difference to search engines or visitors. YouTube, owned by Google, stores millions of Gigabytes of new video each day without charge. The importance of reducing code has therefore diminished over the years.

Blogging Software - WordPress

The increasingly popular blogging tools such as WordPress tend to be expansive in the code that they produce so that they have low text: code ratios. Nevertheless, they can do well in positioning for low and medium difficulty keywords. Top positioning on search engines for the more difficult keywords tend to go to websites with vast numbers of incoming links. I have yet to see a WordPress website achieve top positioning for a difficult keyword but time will tell.

There may be links within the head area instructing browsers to bring in information from another file such as CSS. Another example is the favicon or favourites icon. This is a small image located in the root directory of the website that appears at the left of the tab for all the webpages of the website that are open on a browser. Wikipedia tabs have a 'W' motif and EzineArticles has a small motif including 'Ezine@rticles'. The code for a favicon in the head is rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" / - within angled brackets.

The Head area of the webpage coding ends with the /head tag which is immediately followed by the body opening tag.

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