Advanced Tip: Improving
Rankings via Server Side Includes (SSI)
Recent changes in Google's algorithm
have caused sites to disappear or to shift in rankings this
month. Many searchers have complained that Google's relevancy
has declined from the changes. Therefore, don't be surprised
if they continue to tweak their formula causing ranking to
bounce up and down for awhile.
One observation regarding the new formula
appears to be a greater preference for pages that change often.
"Fresh" pages are thought to be more valuable than
old, "stale" pages. The question is how do you make
your page appear "fresh" every time a search engine
chooses to spider it?
You could try to update all your pages
in some small way everyday, but who has time for that? Luckily,
you could take advantage of a feature of many Web servers
called Server Side Includes (SSI). SSI's are simply statements
in your HTML that tells your Web server to include a certain
block of text when the page is served to a Web browser or
even a search engine's spider. There are other ways to dynamically
generate content on your Web site such as using JavaScript
or VBScript. However, these require the search engine spider
to execute the script in order to see the new content. Most
search engines will not do this since they take a more simplistic
approach when reading a Web page.
With SSI's, the content is transparently
merged into your page by your Web server before the search
engine's spider ever sees it. Therefore, the spider does not
have to even know you used a server side include. Using this
method, you can merge in today's date on your page giving
your Web site an up to date look not only to your visitors,
but to an engine checking for new content since its last visit.
To merge in a date on a Unix server, you'd simply insert this
command into your HTML:
<!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL"
-->
The above will display the default date
format of your server on the location of the page that you
place the tag. To specify an alternate date format, include
something like this near the top of your page:
<!--#config timefmt="%m/%d/%y"
-->
where the above would display the date
in month, day, and year order.
Changing the date alone may not be enough
for a spider to consider the page as being "new."
Therefore, you should create a text file with various sentences
or paragraphs appropriate to your page and then use a script
to randomly merge in a different block of text each time the
page is served. For example, you could have a "news"
box on your page that displays various news clippings about
your industry. You can find one such random text script by
visiting this script
archive resource page.
Most servers by default will only support
SSI on pages ending in .shtml. However, some search engines
may not give you the "freshness" bonus if they see
the .shtml extension. Ideally, you should use SSI on pages
with regular .html or .htm extensions. You can do this by
creating an .htaccess file in your site's root directory (or
edit the existing text file) and add the following line:
AddHandler server-parsed.html
The above will tell your server to support
SSI on all files ending in .html, assuming your Web host supports
it. The drawback with SSI is that not all Web hosts support
it because it exacts a performance penalty on their servers.
That's because the server must read each page and look for
include statements. Before getting too far into SSI, contact
your Web host (or your system administrator if you host your
own site) and ask them if they support SSI for your domain
or whether they can activate it. Also inquire about what level
of SSI they support.
Unfortunately, I don't have the space
here to take your through all the in's and out's of SSI, but
there are many good reference guides on the Web. If you're
a novice user still struggling with HTML, then you may want
to focus on the optimization basics for now. However, if you're
ready to move onto something more advanced, SSI is an excellent
way to gain a competitive edge while enhancing the value of
your site.
SSI Resources:
Planet Ocean has one of the best SSI tutorials
I've seen for the search engine optimizer, taking the user
through many relevant topics in a non-intimidating manner.
However, they do require a subscription for $97. This entitles
you to their vast library of SEO articles plus their monthly
newsletter for six months. They offer some of the best optimization
advice on the Web, so if you are not already a current subscriber,
I would highly recommend becoming one .
Other SSI Resources:
http://hoohoo.ncsa.uiuc.edu/docs/tutorials/includes.html
http://www.oltronics.net/ssifaq.html
About Article
This article is copyrighted and has been
reprinted with permission from FirstPlace Software, the makers
of WebPosition
Gold. FirstPlace Software helped define the SEO industry
with the introduction of the first product to track your rankings
on the major search engines and to help you improve those
rankings. A free
trial of WebPosition Gold is available from their Web
site.
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