Demystifying the Search Engine Mystery

2005-02-24T14:03:00.000-08:00

You want your web site to have high rankings in the search engines and you want it now. With web technology constantly changing what you knew a year ago about search engines is probably not entirely true today. There is so much more to the process today than there was yesterday and the amount of information that is now provided can be overwhelming and confusing to try and sort out.

The popular misconception that a web site will be listed on the search engines instantly once the site is published to the web has created a lot of disappointment, as well as grievances with web designers. Time schedules for getting registered can range anywhere between 1 week to 3 months, depending on the search engine. The process takes time and technical skills to prepare your site for search engine submission.

When the market became open to private parties owning web sites, basically all that was needed was an abundance of key words in the key word meta tag . (Meta tag is located in the head of the document and looks like this: meta name="keywords" content=”florist, flowers, roses, etc. etc.”) These keywords could be misspellings, plurals, singulars and just about anything you wanted to throw in the pot. However, today this is untrue. The rules have changed and they begin with your choice of a domain name.

Search engines do rely heavily on keywords to include you in their directories; however, the keywords must also be placed within the body of your page, page title, page description, domain name, and file name.

1) When thinking about your key words, think about what people search for. These could include phrases. Don’t leave out phrases. (eg. “discount flowers”, “flower specials”, “hard to find flowers”)

2) Your page title should be a short summary of your keywords you’re using. Let’s say you’re a discount florist. A good page title would be “Discount Flowers Offering Daily Specials”. Keep it simple, but remember to use your keywords.

3) Page description should be a bit lengthier than your page title. Your discount florist’s description may be, “Discount florist providing daily flower specials, including roses, daffodils and those hard to find flowers.”

4) File name could be named “discount-florist.htm”.

5) Your text needs to be loaded with the keywords that you intend to use in your Meta tag. Healthy keyword count on your page is at least 5% of your total page text. This means when designing your site, you must think about what it is you want to sell or promote and how you’re going to sell it.

6) Fill your page with relevant text. Pages that hold more images than text will have a far more difficult time getting registered, if at all.

7) When a search engine spider and/or robot go out in cyberspace looking for information, it will help to offer them pure text, rather than coding. One way to minimize your code is to use external CSS style files, as well as external Javascript files.

A site that I often refer to is http://www.gnc-web-creations.com. This is a wonderful resource that provides valuable information to help you in optimizing your site for search engines, as well, as free online SEO (search engine optimization), HTML & CSS classes.

For higher rankings, consider writing articles, submit them to other web sites, create a blogger and link it to your site, use free classified listings (search for “free classifieds”) and/or check out Google Ad Words (http://www.google.com/ads/). If you have a little money in your advertising budget, Google Ad Words is the way to go. You get to choose how much you want to spend. It is true that link popularity is something that search engines look for when indexing your site.

Designing a website is fun. However, in order to be effectively promoted on search engines, it will take a lot of hard work, as well as knowledge to properly prepare your site. If you are hiring a designer to do your site, make sure you question him about his knowledge of search engine optimization. If you don’t, you may be disappointed in the results your site appears in searches.