In most scenarios SAP Netweaver Portal is implemented for intranet / extranet access since it is targeted for employees or business partners. We don’t care SEO (Search Engine Optimization) in these scenarios. However, when we start to expand our target to “everyone”, we have to consider about making search engine friendly web pages. If you are advertising or selling your services & products online, it becomes one of the most important subjects. In this blog I will explain the basic rules to make our Portal search-engine friendly.
The magic rule is:
If you understand the behaviors of search engines and treat them friendly; they will definitely make you happy.
Before talking about details, it is essential that we need to know how search engines work. If we understand basic principles of the search engines then we can easily create search engine friendly web site.
Technically, the search engine is not different than any application that we develop every day. It performs several jobs to get the most appropriate results for visitors: CRAWLING, INDEXING, PROCESSING, CALCULATING RELEVANCY and DISPLAYING
Search engines first crawls a web site to see what is there. It starts from entry point and follow all the links and indexes whatever it see. We have to make sure that search engines can see the right content. After a page is crawled, the next step is to index its content. Basically, the process of indexing is identifying words and expressions that best describe the page and storing into database. Then it is time to wait for search requests.
When a search request comes, the search engine selects the web pages stored in its database according to the search term. In most cases, there are plenty of results. Now, it is important to give most relevant results. It calculates relevancy with a complex algorithm and retrieves the results ordered by relevancy.
Now we have a critical question. How can we increase relevancy for our web site? Actually there are various methods that can increase the relevance of a webpage within the results. However, every search engine has its own rules and these rules change with time. There are rules that you have to follow but any of them does not guarantee the high ranking in the results. You just follow the rules and wait. Be patient and give time for search engines to index your pages. You will probably see an increase in the ranking after a while.
Let’s see some of these basic rules:
KEYWORD DENSITY
Keyword density is a very important part of search engine optimization. It is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to total number of words on the page. It was an important factor on search-engine ranking in late 1990s. When webmasters discovered this technique, they started to spam search engines. Lots of pornographic sites are stuffed with irrelevant but popular keywords and started to mislead search-engines. As a result, search-engines changed their algorithm rapidly and pulled of these spammers. Now, the optimum keyword density is about 3%-5%. Sites with higher keyword densities are treated as keyword spammers. Some advices about keywords which can help improve your site’s ranking:
- Put main keyword within first 5 words.
- Distribute your keyword evenly in the content.
- Do not just distribute keywords in the content, use in the phrases.
- Use keyword in page title and description
- Use keyword in
,
,
, or tags.
TITLE & META DESCRIPTION & KEYWORDS TAGS
Titles and Meta descriptions should be descriptive and meaningful for all pages. Here is a sample tags:
SAP Portal generates title with JavaScript. Search engines understand title and meta tags only if you use them in the first
part in the whole page. You may need to do some java coding to set the title and meta tags.
AVOID DYNAMIC URL’S
Create a static URL wherever possible. Some search engines may have problem indexing pages with dynamic URLs. If you have to use dynamic URLs, make sure they do not contain “?”.
These are the most important rules but there are plenty of rule that you have to follow. Actually there are books written about this topic. I mentioned only a few rules that I used in my previous projects. If you want to use professional SEO techniques, you have to spend some more time after reading this blog.
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