| Sometimes, aspects of following best practices and standards can have unexpected but positive effects in other areas of the work. A properly structured document complete with accessibility features, such as alt text and noframes content for framed pages, can enhance your search engine ranking. The reason is because a well-structured document contains a natural hierarchy of topical logic that you can tap into, placing keywords in helpful places. Images should always contain alt text for accessibility reasons, but this can also be used to increase search engine rankings if you make judicious use of keywords in the text. Similarly, if headings using structured, hierarchical h1, h2, tags contain keywords, this can increase the site's ranking with some engines. Other methods for increasing search engine rankings include ensuring that image maps have alternative text menus , putting essential text as close to the top of the page as possible by designing your table and frame layouts well, and putting noframes content on frameset pages. Of course, nothing can beat a site where the content itself is well written, fits the description of the site, and makes good use of the site keywords in its text. Aside from increasing search engine rankings, good content increases word-of-mouth promotion by your site's visitors . |
