On 12 Jun 98, Jack Killpatrick wrote:
> and keep the word "habitrail" as text, then the ratio would be 1/10
> (including 9 remaining text words) and the site ranking would increase for
> searches on "habitrail".
>
> Any truth to this?
A little.
All of the major search engines (rather obviously, I suppose) tend to accord higher
rankings to pages in which a search term appears more frequently than do other
words. But a majority of engines also give priority to the first couple of paragraphs
of text on a site (the assumption being that if the word appears several times right
at the start, the site's likely more relevant.)
Mind you, most engines also give a great deal of weight to the site's <title> as well.
(Less so to meta words, generally.) Another consideration is that common words
are often ignored completely by many engines (Altavista rejects "Web" as a search
term, for instance!)
So in a case such as Jack cites, where there's a single and rather unique keyword
("habitrail"), it might be mildly advantageous, with some engines, to have the word
repeated several times in the first couple of text paragraphs, and convert the rest
of the page to images. Maybe. For more on search engines, see:
http://www.searchenginewatch.com
> Also, if you want to voice any opinions regarding converting all the text
> in a site to gifs (tee hee) (around 40 separate pages of varied length),
> let 'em fly.
Hmm. Does the phrase, "totally unclear on the freakin' concept!" convey any
meaning to you?? :) Man, there's so many problems with that approach: download
times, obviously; pages being non-scalable; it being impractical or impossible for
users to save sections of text for future reference; the fact that search engines
that dig down beyond a site's initial page will fail to index almost its entire
contents; forcing users to read large volumes of text in sizes and/or colors that
may be unpleasant or illegible for them; gawd, where do I start?? :)
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Brent Eades, Almonte, Ontario
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Town of Almonte: http://www.almonte.com/
Business Web site: http://www.almonte.com/brent/
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