SEO Best Practices

3.1 Index Card Concept

Search Engines use the term, "index a site." The schema comes from the library index cards invented by Carl Linnaeus, the pioneer of information retrieval. Melvil Dewey further improved on this introducing the Dewey decimal system. The schema for a web page is based on this indexing system, with all the accompanying elements.

Plate 1: Information Search the old fashioned way

The reason this is mentioned is that page design should follow the same pattern as an index card since it is schema that was used in its initial conception. As in the case of index card information retrieval, key elements in the cards helped researchers determine a book's relevance. By the same token, Search Engine determination was originally based on the same key concepts.

The more the keyword phrase appeared in the core index card elements, the more relevant the book was. Conversely, the more the keyword phrase appears in the above mentioned web page elements, the more relevant the page is.

When creating a web page, these structural indexing elements should be representative of the content of the page. For example, putting words and phrases in the meta keywords that do not appear on the page are seen as spammy. The same goes for the meta description, it should, like the library index card, be an accurate compendium of the page. This does not mean that the meta description should be a scholarly summary, but one that concisely describes the page while still marketing of the product or service.