Basic Search Engine Concepts

If your website traffic depends upon people that may want your product or service finding you on the Internet among millions of other websites ... and they do not yet know who you are ... your site needs to appear in the major search engines! Knowing this to be true is obvious but knowing what to do about it is far less obvious than it may seem.

Heard about those services that submit your site to 300 or more top search engines for a modest sum? Well first of all, there are only about 10 truly significant search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.) and second, simply submitting your site and moving on to other affairs will no longer suffice if you are looking for good rankings and relevant search phrase listings.

No doubt a few people stumble across a loophole once in a while that gets a top listing on a particular search engine without much effort. But for the long haul, careful attention to details and persistence with a realistic game plan will bring the greatest rewards over time.

The following topics discuss what many have found to be a sound approach to acquiring good search engine listings. There are no secrets or miracle technologies involved though we do recommend one piece of software highly if you are serious about producing results, WebPosition Gold by FirstPlace Software. We also highly recommend one web service, WordTracker. Using the WordTracker databases you can identify the best search terms to optimize your pages for and to then track using WebPosition. It is extremely valuable to know what applicable terms and phrases have the lowest competition on the major search engines and Wordtracker has made a special 75 page guide available for free! This guide uses a fictitious company to walk through the steps of improving your site's search engine performance and is highly recommended.

Search Engine Readiness

The first place to start when looking for good search listings is with the design and content of the website itself. We would NEVER suggest that a website be designed for the sole purpose of obtaining good search rankings! Design your website to appeal to your visitors and provide the message and content that makes sense to the user. But, whatever its design, take the time to evaluate it for search engine performance. Most of all, make sure that basic structural tasks have been attended to. To the novice site designer they may acquire an importance bordering on obsessive behavior and be carried too far. To the seasoned veteran, they may be lost in the rush to complete complex work on time and under budget. Regardless ... these elements need to be properly attended to in the building process of all web sites in order to expect the site to be "search engine ready."

All pages need to have relevant and unique titles in the Title Tag.

• Page titles are important to users because they show at the top of the browser window and is the text saved with the link if the user saves the page as a bookmark.
• Page titles are used by most robot driven search engines as a component of their ranking scheme and/or as the actual listing on the search results page.

All images need to have relevant text in the Alt Tags.

• In the days of terribly slow modems many people surfed with graphics turned off and depended upon the Alt Tag text to guide them through the site. This may remain a viable justification for including text in these tags but it is also true that the user will be able to see this text while the images load and a significant impression can be presented by using relevant copy.
• People with various disabilities that use alternate reading devices rely upon the Alt tags to advise them of what an image represents, especially if it is a link.
• Some search engines "read" this text and include it in their ranking scheme.

All primary pages should have relevant Description and Keyword copy in the META Tags.

• Originally this text was intended to be specifically used by services such as the search engines but the search engines have grown wary of the page author's ability to be trusted in this regard and no longer rely heavily upon the copy that is placed there. However, it is still used to varying degrees and should not be eliminated!
• The act of preparing Meta Tag Keywords and Phrases can be fundamental to the process of "Enhancement" and establishing a strategy for targeting the best words and phrases to seek high ranking listings on with the various search engines.

Make sure that no technology utilized on the site (frames, re-directs, dynamically generated pages, etc.) will discourage search engines from spidering the site without taking appropriate action to offset the impact.

Create a "robots.txt" file for the site that will help keep the robots from listing inappropriate pages.

Write pages with relevant content! This may seem very obvious but the manner in which most engines currently rank web sites relies heavily on how they decipher the value of the content.

For a new site being completed and made ready for live release or an existing site that undergoes regular maintenance and updating, these basic issues remain of equal importance. Include methods by which these elements are proofed along with spelling, content, and functionality. The benefit will be a site that performs better in the search engine listings on its own merit and one whose performance will be easier to enhance once any weakness is determined.

Search Engine Optimization

When preparing a site that requires good search engine performance, it is crucial to think like your prospective visitors and prepare a list of all "root" words that you believe describe your site's offering(s). Then, determine how often these words are actually searched on and in what phrases they are actually used. The WordTracker service is made for just this purpose. Learn what words and phrases people are searching on. By targeting those that match your site's purpose you will be able to focus effort on known values instead of simply guessing.

By preparing a list of Keywords and Phrases that are known to have searching value, you can start by including them as is appropriate (remember to retain relevancy) in your page's Meta Tags. Some engines will use a page's Meta Description as the search listing text so it remains important to do a good job with these page elements. These words and phrases are also invaluable for use in the Optimization process in general.

Let's say your site promotes a condo rental in Ecuador. The term "travel" finds about 338,000,000 pages in Google while the phrase "travel to ecuador" results in about 6,610,000 pages. This is very high competition to make it into the top 10 for either of those terms. Perhaps more important, even if you were able to get into the top ten for these general terms, the resulting traffic is likely not to be very targeted to what you offer. But, using the WordTracker service you can find more specific phrases that would, if you had a top ranking listing, provide you with valuable and appropriate exposure.

The phrase "ecuador condo rental" has 95,400 pages found so the competition is becoming more manageable but still a bit challenging. This much you can do without help but now it gets harder because you need to consider phrases that YOU might not use to find YOU ... but others do! WordTracker lets you use a key word (like ecuador or condo) to find related phrases and includes information on how often each phrase has been searched on recently and what the competition for that phrase currently is. You cannot possibly know all of the things that people type into search engines! Many of the phrases you simply would not think of have low competition but still could bring valuable traffic to your site.

This allows you to focus your efforts and build a base of high ranking listings for terms that are obtainable. WebPosition Gold can track your performance for specific phrases and search engines which eliminates the tedium of manually checking the search engines, which for more a few phrases is a serious waste of time! WebPosition can also help you construct pages that will compete better for the phrases you have researched by using its' Page Critic component.

Page Critic will evaluate the top ranking pages for any given search phrase and compare your page to the results. You are then given all of the suggested ways in which your page could be modified to become more competitive with the top ranking pages. If you have researched phrases and know what you are seeking, this is a very valuable and time saving feature! Since it relies largely upon analysis of pages that do perform well, it is not prone to errors in judgment about what a particular engine is possibly looking for, it is evaluating what that engine has actually done.

Other Important Factors

The algorithms used by the search engines are very complex. The various companies are very secretive about how they function and what they look for to rank the millions of pages on the WWW. Despite this complexity there are some factors that are known to have an important impact. The most important of these is the number of sites that have links to your site from pages that are listed.

The higher the ranking of the referring pages, the better ... the more of them, the better ... the more of them that relate to the subject matter on your site, the better. Basically you need to take every opportunity to get links to your sites from other sites with different domains.

There are link exchange programs that you can join as well as link exchange scripts that you can host on your own site. The problem with joining an exchange program is that it will require you to host banners or links for other members in return. This may or may not work into your overall design and you may not be able to control the links that appear. We have all seen those terrible flashing banners that look like a system error on a PC. Something like that may deter serious customers. Depending upon the content of your site you might find that a search for related sites will yield some high ranking sites that are happy to exchange links with you. In some cases, delegating a modest budget to this is a good idea to get your program started. Not all highly ranked sites are run by major corporations and many small developers are happy to exchange links because they know about the search ranking values.

I also mentioned hosting your own link exchange system. Of course there are many scripts available for this purpose and you need to be conscious of what they involve in terms of setup, server technology, and maintenance as well as overall features. We have used a script called Intellilink by SmartCGI's for some of our clients and have been pleased with the results. There has been no doubt that it has helped with our search engine ranking efforts while keeping better control over the look of the sites.