Search Engine Optimization for Domino websites

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is becoming more and more important. If you sell a Domino based website to a customer, you'd better also do everything possible to make it accessible to search engines. Here's a few tips that could make the difference.

Is your site accessible to search engines?

Search bots can only follow HTML links. They are unable to follow links in JavaScript or Flash. Therefore, it is very important to use HTML links as main navigation. Sometimes you want to use JavaScript or Flash,e.g. for a horizontal navigation with dropdown menus. In this case Google recommends duplicating the navigation in <noscript> tags. Do not use hidden text: this might be interpreted as tricking.

In most of the problem sites I discovered that search engines couldn't even get past the homepage: it was a splash page containing only images or Flash, with only a few links allowing the user to select their language... and these links were rendered as <a href="" onclick="openPage('...')">. If you want to see how search engines see your site, open it with a text only browser, e.g. Lynx.

Use semantic HTML. Search bots evaluate the value of the content based on the semantic weight of HTML tags rather than <meta> information. Most important is the <h1> tag. You should only have one, and it should contain the main subject of the page. Mind you that the <title> tag and <meta name="description"> stays important, because that is what the search engines render when showing search results.

Is your site search engine friendly?

Search bots concentrate on static content. So the use of '?' and variables in the URL will cause the page to devaluate or even not being crawled at all. Ask your Notes administrator to enable friendly URLs on your site. This makes domino render and interprete '!' as if it was a '?'. Rework your site so that '!' is used in URLs instead of '?'. Good practice is having this option stored in a profile document. And try to limit the number of parameters in the URL to one or two. Read more on this at searchtools.com.

Search engines like undeep sites. An important win here is to have your Notes administrator configure a Website substitution rule. For this blog, it replaces the incoming pattern /domino/ with /hosting/emd/blogs/mme/mme-blog.nsf, which is the actual location of the database. When rendering the links, use the substitution instead of the actual location. This gives you two very important benefits:

• You get URLs that are one or two levels deep, e.g. "/domino/archive/the-content.html". Search engines prefer paths that are no more than one or two levels deep.
• The database can change location without breaking user bookmarks and search engine results.

Another important tip: use dashes to separate words in your URLs. Search engines recognise dashes as word separators. With underscores however they tend to glue the words together. Use dashes sparingly: use too many and it will be considered as 'keyword stuffing'.

Use absolute links

Don't use <base href="" /> and relative links. Relative links are interpreted relative to the page you are on. But outside the context of the page, they break. So always use absolute links, starting from the site root. Always use the redirect instead of the full database path, e.g.: /domino/archive/2006-10-18-most-useful-web-developer-tools.html.

Links in e-mails or rss feeds always have to include the complete path, e.g. http://blog.lotusnotes.be/domino/archive/2006-10-18-most-useful-web-developer-tools.html.

Duplicate content is penalized

This is a tricky one. When the same content has multiple URLs pointing to it, as is the case when you use Notes views, tis is penalized by search engines. The only solution to this is not using the links generated by the Notes views, but always point to document with one single URL. In blogs, this URL is called 'Permalink'. Mind that you will loose any reference of the view once you are on the document.

All pages should have a unique title. Never use a computed field to fill <title>, <meta name="" /> or <h1> with the same content on every page.

Other things to keep in mind

• Avoid broken links. They devaluate your page. Use a link checker!
• Search engines evaluate your page by its age (older pages have more authority) and how it is interlinked with similar sites with authority.
• When you optimize your site, monitor the changes. And keep in mind that it takes at least 15 days before a search engine as Google evaluates the site. Well established brand names as Microsoft or CocaCola can have SEO unfriendly sites and still rank high.
• How important your site may be, it will never even be noticed if you don't have links pointing to it.
• See how the content relates to search keywords. You can find a lot of tools at webconfs.com, but a very interesting one is the Keyword density checker. I discovered that the most important keywords of this blog today were... 'October' 'permalink' and 'posted' :-)
• Don't overdo SEO. This is penalised as well. Keyword density of 7% is good. Higher than 10% is recognised as 'tricking'. Tricking gets you banned.