Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines

Regardless of your level of experience, we encourage you to review your Search Engine strategy so your website will reach the maximum audience possible.

Introduction to Search Engines and Online Directories

Searching the Internet falls into two categories: Search Engines, such as AltaVista and Google, and Online Directories, such as Yahoo! and the Open Directory. Many sites are now combining both categories to provide more relevant results.

Search engines use a tool called a spider that request Web pages, analyzes them for content and follows its links. Theoretically every page on the Web will be visited by a spider at some point in time. Later, the spider reports the information to a database where the information is indexed into appropriate categories. When you search on a keyword, such as "car insurance," the database is queried and the resulting pages should have something to do with "car insurance." Because a spider is a mathematical algorithm, knowing how that algorithm works is the key to getting your site ranked high on search engines.

Directories, on the other hand, have teams of human editors that review each site and decide in which category it belongs. There's no tricking a directory, the best you can do is design a nice site, submit it to the appropriate category and pray that the editors have mercy on you (although some sites such as GoTo.com and FindWhat.com allow you to pay for a ranking).

Optimizing Your Site For Search Engines

Each search engine is different so the best you can do is to create a site that caters to all of them. Search engine friendly sites are simple, text-based sites that deal with a specific topic. Keep out frivolous images, don't use frames, and never, under any circumstances, add Java to your site (its slow and search engines don't like it). There are five areas to concentrate on:

1. The title of the page
2. The URL of the page
3. The meta tag area
4. The body text
5. Link popularity

Let's use CruzanConcepts.com as an example for a Web Design firm located in Jacksonville, Florida. We'll name it Cruzan Concepts. People on a search engine will use a variety of phrases to find a Web Design firm in Jacksonville and you'll want to use these phrases in your page title, the URL, in the meta tag area and the text on the actual page (the body).

Start with five keyword phrases that people will most likely search with to find a Web Design firm in Jacksonville. Our research indicates that the destination plus the keyword is a good start. Then add in a couple of more general keyword phrases. It's a bad idea to use a single word as a keyword, such as "Design," primarily because it is highly competitive and also because few people search with such general terms.

You'll want to add in the name of the firm so searchers can find your design firm by name. Here's a list (feel free to add to it, but don't overload your site with keywords).

- Jacksonville Web Design
- Cruzan Concepts <The name of your company>
- Jacksonville Banner Ads
- Jacksonville Email Advertising
- Jacksonville Web Hosting

---- Title ----
Make the Title of your home page "<<Name of your establishment>> - Cruzan Concepts." An example of the HTML code is: <TITLE>Cruzan Concepts Jacksonville Web Design</TITLE>, but most authoring tools allow you to do this without coding.

---- URL ----
The URL should reflect a keyword phrase. If you have a domain name that includes one of your keywords, such as www.NonToxicSoap.com (sorry, taken), search engines will love it. Otherwise, name the page accordingly.

The main page should always use index.html or default.html, but for pages underneath the main page, use the keywords to name the pages. Cruzan Concepts' domain name is www.cruzanconcepts.com. Therefore, the main page is www.cruzanconcepts.com/index.html and the pages underneath it should be www.cruzanconcepts.com/web-design.html, www.cruzanconcepts.com/banner-ads.html, etc. Just make sure that the page you're naming corresponds to what the page is about. If you have a page about the Web Design Process, then it wouldn't make sense to have it named, banner-ads.html.

---- Meta Tags ----
Now we'll get a bit more technical. Meta tags are special HTML tags that describe a Web page, but does not effect how the page looks. Most search engines use meta tags to build their indices, so it's smart to fill the meta tag area with your keywords. Here is an example of the code:
<META NAME = "keywords" CONTENT="web design, Jacksonville web site, Jacksonville web design, banner advertising, low cost web sites, Jacksonville banner advertising, small business web sites">
<META NAME = "description" CONTENT="Jacksonville Web site design firm for small to mid-size businesses that are low in cost and high in design quality.">

Notice that there are two meta areas: keywords and description. The keyword tag should include your keywords, the description should describe your site in plain English. You can view your site meta tags by clicking on View, Source from your browser.

---- The Body ----
The last major component in optimizing your site for search engines is the body. Repeat each keyword found in the meta tag area at least once in the body, but never more than four times. You can get creative with this. For example, you might have your text state:

Welcome to Cruzan Concepts, your one stop design firm for small to midsize business. We give you high quality design that will fit your budget! Blah, blah, blah…

Of course, the text must make sense. You certainly don't want to turn off your visitors. You can also place some keyword phrases as headings. Try to blend in the keyword phrases into a total page text count of approximately 250 characters.

Link Popularity
Link popularity is becoming more important in the search engine world. Unfortunately, it's difficult to obtain. Many search engines, such as Google, use link popularity as their primary indicator of relevance. For example, if you have a site that has 1000 other Web sites linking to it, the link popularity of your site will increase. It will increase even further if those Web sites are similar to yours and if those sites are link popular sites as well. For example, a baseball site that links to your hotel site will not carry the relevance that another hotel site will.

That's the basics. If you follow these rules, your site will be a friend to the search engines. But the game isn't over yet. Now you have to tell the search engines about your newly optimized site.

Submitting
Some search engines will never index your site if you don't submit it, others won't get around to it for two months or even longer! In any case, submitting can help speed the process, but you have to be careful about how you do it. Submit your main page (don't worry about the child pages – the search engine will scan these) by clicking on the "Add URL" link located on each search engine. The general rule is to submit it and wait. If you don't find your site ranked after a few weeks, try submitting again. Don't ever submit your site more often than every two weeks - the search engines will view this as spamming and ban your site for eternity.

Submitting your site to directories is a similar process, but first verify that the directory does not have your site listed. Search for your domain name, such as www.cruzanconcepts.com and if it comes up, then you don't need to do anything else. If it doesn't, research the proper category for your site and then submit it under that category. You may never get listed though and if you do, it can take months.

Contact Us
If you would like Cruzan Concepts to make your site "Search Engine Ready", please Contact Us.

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