|
Search Engine Optimization
According to the Georgia Institute of Technology, 88% of Internet
users find new web sites through search engine listings. Search
engine listings send droves of visitors to your site and they are
free. I have personally seen websites where traffic has increased
ten-fold as a result of good search engine positioning. Nothing
could be better, but there is a catch.
Search Engine Positioning is the process of boosting and
maintaining your website's position in the results that Internet
users see when they run queries on different search engines.
There are two distinct steps you need to take in order to maximize
the effectiveness of your position in a search engine listing. The
first is to make key modifications to your pages in order to gain
top positioning within a search engine's index. The second is something
that is commonly ignored. That position needs to be maintained.
Too often, webmasters gain a great position on a search engine only
to let it slip away, taking business away with it. Don't make this
mistake. This essay is written to give you a good idea of how important
SE positioning is in bringing more people to your website.
As you probably know by now, merely being listed in a search index
is not enough to bring new visitors to your website. Your website
must rank at or near the top of the search results in order to collect
all the traffic that search engines can produce. The first major
step in positioning your site is choosing descriptive and focused
meta- keywords. The importance of excellent keywords cannot be emphasized
enough--you can read about keywords in the Keywords Section. Getting
listed on a search engine below 499 other websites simply won't
work. You need to get a listing near the top of your category to
collect all the traffic a search engine can deliver. But the good
news is that you can dramatically improve your positioning with
a little bit of elbow grease. All it takes is some key modifications
to your website and a little thought. It's not that hard and you
can do it.
If you've used the Internet at all, you should be very familiar
with what Internet Search Engines do. You've also noticed that it's
sometimes hard to find what you're looking for, even with a fairly
specific search. Your potential visitors will have the same trouble,
unless you do a little legwork to make sure you're listed well for
the keywords that are important to your Web site.
Just in case you're unfamiliar with how the engines work, here's
a brief explanation: Most engines "spider" the Web looking
for new pages to add to their database or index. You can wait for
one of these spiders to locate your site but you could be in for
a long wait. The better approach is to go to their site (or a site
submission service) and tell them about your new Web site.
Search engines need a way to examine the websites that people submit
to them. Some search engines like Yahoo! employ people to check
each website registered with them, but these are in the minority.
Most other search engines use specialized software called "spiders"
or "robots" to do this. Spiders help search engines
deliver accurate search results by determining how relevant a website
is to the phrases and keywords a web surfer uses. Spiders "crawl"
through websites, analyzing text content and following hyperlinks.
This information about the website is used to determine how it should
be categorized and ranked. Because the spider's functions are so
critical, anything relating to the way they operate is a closely
guarded secret that the search engines would prefer you not to know.
It is, however, in our best interest to understand as much as we
can about them, and to use that information to our advantage when
designing a web page.
One of the most important things to keep in mind when designing
your website is to see your site from a spider's point of view.
A spider can only analyze text and words that are in a structured
format. That is exactly why a frames- based site rarely ranks well
on a search engine. The HTML for a frames site doesn't have a conventional
format-- all of the content is jumbled about the page in different
code sections and script excerpts, and that confuses spiders. Also,
a spider needs to know right away what it should look for when it
crawls your site. Using meta keywords is the best method for doing
that. Otherwise, spiders will try to guess the content on your page
and won't necessarily be successful -- getting ranked high for something
unrelated to your site isn't helpful at all.
Descriptive and targeted meta keywords aren't the only thing search
engine spiders look for. If you do use meta keywords, a spider tries
to find out how relevant those keywords are for your site. For example,
if your site is about recreational fishing, and you use the words
fly-fishing, angling, and deep-sea fishing multiple times in your
site, the spider will see your site being more relavant to those
particular words than words which only appear once (for example,
"commercial fishing"). Also, some spiders consider the
position of a keyword to be important. If a keyword is in the page
title, or in the first six lines of the page body, some search engine
spiders consider that to be very significant. The "weight"
of a keyword is a big factor, as well. If a keyword appears three
times in a page with one thousand words, that keyword has a lower
weight then if it was on a page with thirty words. Pages with heavily
weighted keywords are considered more relevant to that keyword,
and usually rank higher. However, it is possible to go too far and
actually abuse the way a spider works.
Spiders are the workers behind the scenes at the search engines.
Some of them crawl through millions of websites every month. A website's
success depends on cooperating with the search engines and their
methods. To cooperate with the search engines, it is also important
to understand how they and their spiders operate. Also, by comparing
your website to the top three sites on an engine, you can learn
what other webmasters do that give them a high position, and you
can incorporate those features into your site.
Pitfalls in Page Design:
1. KEYWORDS: Never repeat a keyword multiple times in a row on a
page. Also be aware that using a keyword too often on the page is
just as bad as not using it enough.
2. FRAMES: You may be interested to know that some search engine
spiders will not follow links that are in frames. This means that
if your opening page is created with frames, then the spider will
find absolutely nothing else on your site and you'll seriously limit
your exposure to people doing searches for you, unless you submit
each secondary page manually.
If you wish to use frames, a good idea is to put in links and text
in the <NOFRAMES> section.
Insert a link such as <A HREF="my_other_page.htm">Click
here</A> should work. Since it won't appear on your page,
no one can accidentally click on it. However, the spider will be
able to follow it.
3. LINK TO HOME PAGE: Since many visitors will find pages that branch
off from your home page, ALWAYS, on every single page, include a
link back to your home page and/or your previous page. If you don't,
people from the search engines will often jump a secondary page
in your site but will not be able to easily find your home page
and will then go on to someone else's Web site! You'd be surprised
how many big companies make this simple design error.
4. FIRST FEW LINES: Most search engines will display the first few
lines of text from the page, or the contents of the META description
tag, to the user. The user will then scan this summary to determine
if it's what they're looking for. Even if you have the keywords
in there, you also need to say something to encourage the user to
click on your site over the others listed. Try as clearly as possible
to describe the contents of that page or your site in those first
few lines! If not, you may rank well, but no one will click on your
page.
"DOORWAY" PAGES: Unfortunately, what is appealing
to the search engines is not always the best way to display
the content for your Web site. Therefore, strongly consider creating
a secondary "doorway" page for each product or service
you offer designed for the search engines. Describe the product/service
clearly but make sure you make generous use of keywords in your
sentences. You can then link to another page for more information
or to your order form.
The reason this works, and generally works better than most methods,
is that engines often take the keywords being searched and divide
it by the total number of words in the page or in the first portion
of the page. Therefore, you may only have the keyword on the page
a couple of times, but if there's not a lot of other words, those
keywords appear to be much more "significant" to the page's
overall content.
You don't have to have links to these secondary pages from your
home page. They simply act as a "doorway" to the appropriate
page on your Web site. As a result, other visitors do not see them.
If you don't link to them though from your home page or a close
secondary page, you'll need to submit each of these pages manually
for the search engines to find and index them.
Spy
See which pages appear above yours in a search. Use your browser
to view the HTML source code for the page. Try to determine why
that page ranked better than yours for that particular engine and
keyword search. Most likely it emphasizes one or more of the techniques
described here. Once you recognize the technique, try to duplicate
and improve upon that concept to achieve a better ranking, or at
least a roughly equivalent ranking.
EXPERIMENT: Try different page designs and submit them. What works
for one engine may not work so well with another. Consider making
different "doorway" pages tailored for each engine when
necessary. Avoid submitting too many similar pages to the same engine
(particularly on the same day) or you risk your site being banned
or the submission rejected.
|
