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Home > Search Engine Tips |
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 CRAWLING - Search engines use advanced mathematical algorithms to crawl through the millions of websites indexed within their directory. But there is one guarantee that you can always count on: IF YOU DO NOT SUBMIT YOUR URL TO THE SEARCH ENGINES, YOU WILL NOT BE LISTED! You must submit your URL to each search engine you are interested in being listed on. Submit your site as soon as it goes live, and set reminders for yourself to submit it again about once every 3 months. There are services that will submit your site to hundreds of search engines for a fee. But, they often don't really work, and most of those search engines have no traffic to tap anyway, certainly when compared to the top 10 players. So as with many things in life, you're better off doing the job yourself. Which Search Engines Are The Most Important?
If you don't have a lot of time to spend submitting your site to search engines, make sure you at least submit your site to these top 3! These three search engines compose the majority of all website traffic. RANKING - (information taken from an article written by Paul Boutin) Playing the cops-and-robbers game of search engine optimization is where people tend to waste the majority of their time. There are three obvious ways to get your Web page to come up at the top of the search results for a specific search phrase. The funny thing is most people never try these. They are: keep it short, use title and meta tags, and make a separate page for each search phrase. Keep it short. Most pages have too much text in them to score well for one particular phrase. A page that has a few words, including "Web consulting," will score higher than one that goes on and on and doesn't mention Web consulting until the 10th paragraph. After all, which page is more likely to be only about Web consulting? Use title and meta tags. All search engines rank the title and meta descriptions and keywords highly, as well they should. So our page about Web consulting should contain these tags: Web consulting. Many pages have the company or site name in the title and even some sort of marketing pitch in the description field. But a page titled "WebHedz: The ultimate Web consulting specialists for Java, dHTML, and e-commerce" will score lower than one that just says Web consulting. That said, there are a lot of tricks that search-engine spammers, optimization specialists - use to get their clients' pages to come out on top for search phrases that have nothing to do with the content on their clients' Web sites. And it's for this reason that search engines spend a lot of time learning how to filter out these tricks. Spammers spent tens of thousands of hours creating pages with invisible text that only the search engines will see. Nevertheless, the search engineers figure out how to spot and ignore this kind of text within a few short months. So tempting though it may be, your best bet is to avoid blatant trickery. However, no matter how you go about getting your pages on top, all that jockeying for position will be meaningless unless users actually click on your URL. CLICKING - All of the work you've done to get your site crawled at the top of rankings is meaningless if you neglect the final step: Getting the searcher to click through to your site. These days, few users will click on a page described as "Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso Pablo Picasso art art art art" in search engine results. But if you use TITLE to specify the most likely search term that matches the page, and DESCRIPTION to provide a quick (50 words max) synopsis of the info on the page, your site will attract a lot more clicks. For real estate information pages, you may want to specify that TITLE contain the island name, and DESCRIPTION would hold the summary that appears later in the page, like this:
Don't Scare Them Away Another mistake new Web marketers make is trying to stop search engines from sending users directly to individual pages on the site — something they huffily call "deep linking." They'll force their Webmaster to redirect anyone who hasn't come through the site's front door back to the home page, as if the site were a brick-and-mortar store. This is usually justified as "customer experience" and "branding," but all it really says is the site doesn't trust its customers to know what they want. I'm guessing most sites abandon this practice once they look at their log files and see their would-be customers abandoning the site after being pulled away from the information they really came to ready. All that said, there are ways to beat the system, as long as you don't mind getting your hands a little dirty. GOOGLING - Google uses a different ranking system than other search engines, and it is important for you to know how to dig in and work the system to get higher ranking on this search engine monster. Google gives a lot of "weight" to the title tag when searching for keywords. So make sure your most important keywords or keyphrases appear in the title tag. It seems to work best if you have other words in your title tag, too, after your keywords, but try to remain under 35-40 characters. As many of you know, Google does not use meta tags such as keywords or description tags. This is because the text in these tags cannot be seen by visitors to a website. And Google feels these tags will be abused, by webmasters placing lots of unrelated words in them in order the get more visitors. The lack of support for meta tags means that Google creates your description from the first few lines of text on your page, this means you have to have your keywords and phrases right at the top, if it finds them your page becomes more relevant. If it doesn't the rest of your page has to work harder to become relevant. For example Scroll back to the top of this page and you will see:
The above sentence includes keyphrases related to this page. Google considers keyword density in the body of a page for determining relevancy too, so make sure your keywords and phrases appear a couple of times throughout the whole page. Don't go overboard though, a density of 6-10% seems to work best. Other advice about making your page relevant includes putting keywords into the heading tags . Also try and bold as many keywords as you can. As of late Google seems to be indexing text in alt image tags, so includes your keyphrases in there too. |
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