Have
you ever wanted to have your Web page appear on the first page of a Search
Engine or even better, have your page listed first on the first page.
The following contains some information that I have learned over the years
that I hope you find useful.
Page Organization
Organizing your site into topics is important for optimization. Lets say that you where a fruit vendor and you had a web page with all your fruits on the same page. The Search Engines would categorize your page as "fruit"
which may not be desirable. A better approach would be to have one page for bananas, one page for apples, one page for grapes, etc. and have your main page about fruit. So if a user searches for fruit, they could see your main page listed on the Search Engines. If they searched for Bananas, that different page would could be listed. This basic organization sets you up for the next step - Keyword Density.
Keyword
Density
It is important to have an idea of what words people are using to search the Internet with. If they were searching for "apples" then you want to have a page that has the word "apples" (the keyword) on it many times. This is called Keyword Density. The Search Engines will show your page in their listing as your page is all about apples. It is a good
idea to use the keyword in the Heading Tags, Page Title and even the name of the page like, aples.html.
The images on your page should have keywords in the "Alternative
Text" area.
Note: Obvious overuse of keyword density is called "keyword stuffing" and
could lessen your ranking. Try to have around 7 keyords per page but this is an arbitrary.
Links
to your Site (Important)
Having other
websites linking to your website is very important, especially other websites
with good ranking. The wording in the link is also important. It should
contain the keywords that you are using for a particular page. If a bookseller
had a page dedicated to poetry and another website had a link to his poetry
page, that link should contain the keyword poetry, not a domain name. Example:
Good
To find books
on poetry go to: poetry books
Poor
To find books
on poetry go to: www.bookseller.com
Link Sharing
There are
many websites that offer free link sharing. You subscribe to the service
and they hook you up with other sites who will swap links with you.
This is called link farming and is frowned up by Search Engines and could lower
your rank. Still many webmasters use it and it could work for you as
it makes your site look popular. I tried it once and it did work for
me but you have to be aware that surprising number of people who say
they put your link on their page actually didn't. The other catch is
that they put your link on an obscure page that a search engine will
never find. Search engines discover link sharing by noting the reciprocal
links, so if you swap links with someone who has your link on an obscure
page and your link is not, who is going to benefit?
The best pages to
have linked to your site are those that have a related products to your
own. If you had a site that sold golf clubs, you would want links to
your site on golf equipment pages.
Finding out
who is linked to your site
You can find
out how many links are pointing a site by using the link: command in most
search engines. Just enter the word link with the colon, a space, then
the domain name.
BLOGS, News Feeds and Social Networking
Adding a blog to your site gives you a tool to increase traffic to your site. You can write articles that have great keyword density and links.
News Feeds (or RSS) do a similar thing and thus increase your traffic. Same with Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Google will come and scan your site regularily as
there is continual changing, updating or new content. This is good as Google won't classify your site as "stagnant".
There is a lot to cover on each of these tools so it is recommended you learn about them and implement them into your website.
How
to find out how your page is doing with the Search Engines
There is a tool from Google that can be used to find out how well your pages are being listed with Google
and its free! It is called the Google Toolbar and it tells
you how well a web page is "ranking".
You can get
the toolbar by clicking here. Note: This tool is not perfect.
The
Google Toolbar
After you've
installed the Google Toolbar you can start checking out the PageRank of
Web pages. The green bar under the PageRank gives you the 1 to 10 ranking.
In this case it is a 10.
 No
Ranking |
 5
Ranking - good |
 1
Ranking |
 6 Ranking |
 2
Ranking - common |
 7
Ranking |
 3
Ranking |
 8
Ranking - you rock! |
 4
Ranking |
 9
Ranking |
Helpful
Pages
Offering free
advice on something your expert at, is another good way of driving traffic
to your site. If you had an online grocery store, having a page on how
to make Salsa would get your page recommended to others.
Submission
Failure
In my early
days of web design I went to the submission page of Google and entered
in my URL and clicked submit. "How easy this is" , I thought,
but a couple of months went by and I still didn't get listed. I thought
that there were errors on my Web page so I changed a few things around
and resumitted. Still no listing occured so I sent an e-mail to Google
- no response. I searched around for a solution for submission failure
and found a reference that stated I needed to have a link pointing to
my site. I got a friend who was listed with Google to add a link to my
site and I was listed in a month. If you know of someone whose website
is searched by Google every week, just get him to put a link on his site
to your page and you'll be listed in a little over a week. The lesson
I learned is that you are better off to have someone who is listed in
a search engine to put a link to your site on their page in order to get
listed.
Google
Submision Page
Meta
Tags
Meta tags
are not something that you see on a Web page as they are located in
the HEAD tags of the Web page. The information inside the head tag contains
information about the document, but doesn't show up on the page returned
to the browser. The meta tags are still sometimes used by search engines, but because
of their abuse, are only used by a few search engines. It is still a good idea to have the keywords and
decription Meta tags. To view them you need to right click on the page
and select "View Source". They are listed between the head
tags as seen in the exampe below.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Example Meta Page</TITLE>
<meta name="description" content="This is the description
of what is on the page">
<meta name="keywords" content="Fruit, Bananas, Apples, Peaches, Pears ">
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
</HEAD>
A
Brief Description of some Meta Tags
<meta name="description" content="">
Enter a
description of your Web page between the quotation marks.
<meta name="keywords" content="">
Enter
the Keywords between the quotation marks. Seperate each keyword with a
comma and don't use a space after the comma.
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE">
This tag is
used to prevent Microsoft from high jacking or using your site. This technology
has been dropped in Windows XP.
<meta name="ROBOTS" content="INDEX, FOLLOW">
Tells the
search engine robot that its OK to scan the page. If you don't want a
scanning, replace the INDEX, FOLLOW with NO INDEX, NO FOLLOW.
<meta name="revisit-after" content="30 days">
This tag tells
the search engine robot to come back in 30 days. Search Engines don't
often listen to this tag.
<meta name="rating" content="general">
This tag gives
your site a rating like movies get. The ratings are general, mature, restricted,
and 14 years.
<meta name="Expires" content="">
This will
cause a document to be reloaded from the website if the date on the surfers
computer is after the given date in the content (even if it is stored
in the user's cache). Enter a date from the past between the quotation
marks so that the page is always new.
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