Your URL with the <nofollow>tag could also look like this because it doesn’t matter where in the
link tag that you put the <nofollow>attribute:<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.examplesite.com”>Bad Site</a>Again, the <nofollow>tag isn’t essential in your SEO efforts. However, it could help prevent your
site ranking from being reduced, and maybe even increase its ranking a little. At any rate, anything
that keeps your ranking from falling is a good measure to take.Strong and emphasis
When you’re formatting the text on your web site, how do you format the bold and italic words? Do
you use the <b>bold</b>and <i>italics</i>tags? If you do, you should consider using CSS
formatting as discussed earlier. When you format a word with <bold>, the actual site visitor can see
and understand why the word is bold. A search engine crawler, and a screen reader, cannot. All the
crawler or screen reader sees is the <bold>tag. There’s no “emotion” associated with it.A much better use of your HTML is to use the <strong>strong</strong>and <em>emphasis
</em>tags. The <strong>tag translates into bold formatting and the <emphasis>tag trans-
lates into italics formatting. And the difference is that when a search engine crawler or screen
reader encounters these tags, it knows to pay attention to the word or words that are included
in the container.Those words within the container will also be given more weight. So, if you simply boldface or
italicize your keywords, they will look just like any other words on the page when the crawler or
screen reader comes through. But using the <strong>and <emphasis>tags around your key-
words tells those bots to notice that the following words have importance and are more than sim-
ply additional words in the text of a page.Noframes
Another tag that we touched on briefly in Chapter 3 is the <noframes>tag. This tag is supposed
to make your framed web site appear to search engine crawlers as if it has no frames. Crawlers can’t
read multiple frames on a page, and if you’re using frames it’s going to be much harder to get your
site ranked in the search engine results.The <noframes>tag will help, but it’s not entirely foolproof. Even using the tag, you can still run into
problems with browsers and crawlers. Some crawlers won’t crawl a site even if it has <noframes>
tags. So if you can avoid using frames, that’s always your best option. However, if you have to use
frames, be sure to include the <noframes>tag. Table 11-1 shows the difference between the HTML
construction of a normal page, a frames page, and a frame page with the <noframes>tag.As you can see in Table 11.1, the <noframes>tag goes after the <frameset>tags. However, it’s
still read by the crawler and in most cases, the <frameset>tags are ignored. The result is that
your page, without the frames, is what is indexed by the crawler.171
Tagging Your Web Site 11
75002c11.qxd:Layout 1 11/7/07 9:41 AM Page 171