How to be found in search engines

As might be imagined, getting to the top of a search engine list under any category is highly sort after and possibly expensive if you’re promoting something popular. But the rewards for your business could be huge if you consider the number of searches conducted by Google alone. Below is a quick guide to improving your chances of being found in search engines and should be considered carefully before starting off on a new site or a re-design.

The ‘on the page’ optimisation method

An optimised site will show up in search engine lists naturally. When you launch a new site, as long as there is something linking to it, search engines will find it and send out a robotic programs which ‘spiders’ or ‘crawlers’ the site, i.e. reads and records the content in its database. When someone searching types a search term into Google or another search engine, the search engine checks its database and list sites which comply with that search term. To enable a site to do this, it has to be built using ‘on the page’ optimization.

Note: There’s also a complex network of database and directory alliances between search engines where information is shared.

When promoting a site, one of the first things to do is to research and draw up a list of search terms you think people using a search engine, will type into it to find a site like yours. Phrases are better than single words. You may want to consider which terms apply to the different pages of your site, especially if the subject matter varies in various sections or pages. These will form part of your site’s promotion and should be used as set out below.

The factors which help a site to be found in search engine lists are:

1. Most important of all is readable HTML text, with fairly heavy use of the search terms, say, 3 or 4 times per page throughout the text. Do this to all pages. If different subjects are dealt with on different pages, make the text on those pages feature keywords relevant to that subject in the same way.
2. Use a list of relevant key words or phrases as page titles, putting the most important key words or phrases first and separating them by a comma.
3. Text headings should also contain your keywords and phrases, use CSS style sheets to redefine the h1, h2 and h3 tag so that they suit your page design, then use them to define your text headings. Search engines give weight to the text in the headings h tags and the redefining of them will make sure they fit with your design.
4. Text links - a link to another page on your site which sells or talks about say, printer cartridges, should use HTML visible text: ‘printer cartridges’ as the link or if it is a graphic, use ‘printer_cartridges’ in the alt tag.
5. Name graphics, i.e. instead of calling a graphic image on the site, top banner, call it ‘printer_cartridges’.
6. It has sometimes been considered effective using the search terms to name the sub-directories in the root folder.
7. A site map (with links to the each page) linked from the home page will make all pages accessible to the spider and appear only one level down.
8. Put all other code on the page i.e. Java Script, style sheets, etc in separate directories, so the spiders get to the readable relevant text quicker.
9. With some search engines using key words for the url, (web site address) e.g. www.buy-printer-cartridges.co.uk, will work. Hyphens enable the words to be read separately.
10. And of course put your key words in the meta tag section in the page header. Strangely enough, most current search engines seem to take little notice of mata tag key words now but it is worth writing an enticing description of the site in the header, as this will show up in some listings. Write different descriptions for each page of the site if the page subject varies.
11. Links to your site are the other half of the ‘organic’ web site promotion story, the number of them and the quality of them.
    
    Google especially counts good quality links to your site as votes for your site. Being linked to by other relevant sites, where visitors are being referred, because of the quality or interest of your site’s subject matter, will credit you and push you up the rankings. On the other hand links from off subject sites, contrived to boost your link count may well do more harm than good.
    
    Buying a mass of off subject links may possibly have some positive effect but if your web site is an important part of your business, you may be risking Google considering it as spamming and demoting you in their listings.

    The links you really want are from official or authoritative sites, .ed, .ac or .gov, all pretty hard to get. But if you publish good quality content on the subject which your site deals with then people will want to read it and may well recommend it. Work at building links to your site, ask other site owners for them, you may be surprised.
    Flash

12. But remember your web site is for human consumption not search engine ‘bots’, so make your site as interesting and popular as possible and hopefully people will want to come to it. If you can give away some valuable information or service, you may be discovered by other sites and linked to. Good quality case studies or articles may do it for you but set out to attract visitors by asking your self why would someone want to come to your site and then make sure you give them a reason.

13. Lastly: Flash sites, sites built using frames or all graphic content sites won’t register with search engine spiders.

Directories

Yahoo, The Open Directory (Dmoz)etc – here sites are assessed by real humans, rated, listed and ranked according to their relevance. A site should be submitted to these and as many other relevant directories as possible, this will help your site appear in other search engines.

Pay-per-click

This is a sure way of getting your site at the top of the lists or should I say the sponsored lists. These generally appear in a panel with a tinted blue background to the top and on the right of the Google page. It will appear in different ways in different search engines but nearly always as a ‘sponsored sites’. The two main paid systems to be aware of are Google Ad Words – available from their home page and Yahoo Search Marketing – http://www.searchmarketing.yahoo.com/en_GB/arp/srch.php?0=GB0185. Yahoo sponsored sites are listed in MSN, Lycos, Ask Jeeves.

It is worth reading up on the details of both of these systems and how they work, but basically this is the deal: You set up an account and bid for the key word(s) or phrase(s) you want to use. The cost is anything from 10p upwards, every time a visitor clicks on your site from the sponsored site section. Check out the ‘Key Word Assistant’ under Tools on the Overture site, it shows the number of times a search term is used, you’ll find it surprising. Google Adwords has a reputation for not being very clear on how much you are being charged, as the costs vary according to different times of the day but you can set a maximum spend per day rate.

Useful sites:

http://dmoz.org
http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html

http://searchenginewatch.com/ - full of info on search engines and directories.
http://www.highrankings.com - good guest articles and to subscribe to their exellent news letter, go to
http://www.listcast.com/x?oid=18425d

Functionality

E-commerce, catalogues, bulletin boards and sites that can be edited online.