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Making Your Website Search Engine Friendly
To compete in today's market, it is essential to have a website. What exactly do you want to accomplish with your website? If you want your website to be a point of entry for new clients, then chances are you are going to want those potential clients to find your website through a search engine. You might have the slickest flash based website on the net, but if you want potential clients to find it on google, it is not going to get the job done.
Meta tags: Meta tags are the table of contents that you create for the search engine. They alone will not get you a high search ranking, but they are part of what is needed. The first thing you need to consider when starting to optimize your site for search engines is what potential clients will search for in order to find your services. You want to make this more specific rather than general. These should not just be keywords, but key phrases. For instance, if I were creating a keyword for my website it would not be "multimedia," as this is too broad of a term. It would more likely be "web services" and "dvd services". These, too, are a little broad. "Website programming in Pittsburgh" and "corporate dvd authoring" are better choices. Basically, you need to imagine what types of phrases you might search for if you were looking for your service. The title tag should be eight words or less and should contain one or two of your top phrases. Your description tag will be what appears as the descriptive text in most search engines. You main key phrases should also be worked into your description and closer to the beginning. Most search engines will only catalogue the first couple sentences. Finally, your keyword tag should include every conceivable key phrase with commas between them.
Text: The first thing to remember is that search engines primarily catalogue text. They search through your html for important phrases and links and use that to create your profile. Therefore, it is always my advice to any client who wants a search engine to be able to find their site: do not do it in all flash! Maybe your goal is not to have your website be search-friendly. There are other ways to push traffic to a site other than search engines. In those cases, you can go to town with all the flash you want, but if you want clients who might be unfamiliar with you to find your site, you need to have some top of the line text. Your text should be at least 500 to 700 words. It should be as close to the top of the page as possible. Remember the search engine is not looking at the final page as we see it. It is looking at the html. You want your text to be as close to the beginning of the html as possible. You also want to work in your keyword phrases. You want them to appear within the first couple of lines of your text and then repeated a couple of times later in the copy. However, be careful not to over use your key phrases or the search engine could catalogue your site as spam.
Links: Search engines pay a lot of attention to links. Your key phrases within your text should link to pages that contain greater detail about that phrase. The page you are linking to should also be named with the key phrase (for example website_programming.html.) Make sure these links appear close to the top of your page.
Of course, there are many other things you can do to improve your search engine ranking. We could get into keyword densities and prominence, but that is much more broad a topic. I would recommend a software program like WebPosition to help you get these values maximized. Also having other catalogued sites include links on their homepage to yours makes your site look more important to a search engine. Steer clear of creating duplicate sites that link to each other, though. Search engines will recognize the similar content and classify you as spam. You should be able to do just fine with one site. It is good to steer clear of redirects. If your index page immediately redirects viewers to another page, search engines will not take to kindly to it.
Your final action of course is to get a search engine to catalogue your site. You could just sit around and wait for one to find you (usually once one search engine scans your site the others will follow suit.) That could take a while. You can submit your site to the search engine for free. Just go to the search engines website to find out how. This will get you one the fast track (2 to 3 months) for cataloguing. The quickest way is to pay the search engine company's fee to move you to the top of the waiting list.
That is a brief introduction into website optimization sciences. Basically, search engines work to find relevant sites for their clients. The best way to take advantage if this is not with quick tricks, but by making your site relevant to the customer base you are looking for. This includes providing good source information within your text. The search engines will do the rest.
Kirk Peters is a Pittsburgh based multimedia programmer. He has had more than ten years experience developing multimedia applications for hundreds of local companies. He can be reached at 412-716-6585 or at kirk@kirkpeters.com.
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