How to improve search engine results

Note: these tips apply only to the Monash search engine. For tips on improving results in other search engines, read search engine submission tips , from Searchenginewatch.com

Page titles should be meaningful

The Monash search engine gives ten times more weight to terms used in the page title than terms in the body of a document. Use words in your page title that accurately describe the content on the page. For more information on writing good page titles, see Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article on microcontent .

Use appropriate meta data

The Monash search engine gives ten times more weight to terms in keywords and description meta data fields than to terms in the body of a document. Meta data should be unique to each page and accurately reflect the page content. For more information, see "How to use HTML meta data" , from Searchenginewatch.com

Use meaningful hyperlink anchor text

The Monash search engine gives four times more weight to terms that appear as hyperlinked text when the links are to remote sites. Using 'click here' to reference links to other pages will not help your search results.

Use text equivalents for images

The Monash search engine indexes text alternatives for images. It gives them the same weight as text in the body of the page. If your images contain useful content, ensure that they are given appropriate text alternatives. For more information on writing text alternatives for images, see "How should we provide text equivalents for non-text elements on the web?"