All the world’s a text block - First, it is important to understand that spiders love text. Every piece of information about a page can be turned into a long list of words. The domain name (the name of your site), the URL (the web address, technically the uniform resource locator), the filename (from which you created the page), and the page title are all text blocks. So too are the page meta tags (elements in the programming that provide information about the page), heading tags, page text, and even the alt tags on images (which describe what the image is, for spiders or the visually impaired). Finally, the links to and away from each page are text blocks. Google goes even further and looks at all the text blocks of all the pages that link to (or are linked from) your page. In short, all the world is a text block to a Googlebot.

So if you read on a forum somewhere that “domain names don’t matter” or “alt tags are overrated,” ignore that. As I have said, SEO is like throwing mud at a wall – every bit you throw will stick to some extent and the more mud you throw, the more will stick. You can afford to ignore no text block in your quest for dominance! Each text block has a beginning, an end, and a pattern in the middle.

Google will examine each text block separately and take it into the index for that page. Try experimenting on a search using the intitle:anykeyword and inurl:anykeyword operators (search for intitle:antiques or inurl:antiques, for example) and you will see that Google finds a separate place (and weighting) in its index for every text block. In evaluating each block, Google will assume that relevant keywords appear earlier in each text block; tend to appear together; and tend to appear often. Put simply, the spider is looking for prominence, proximity, and density.

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