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Following these simple steps, you can optimize by yourself
the search engine position of your website without extra
money and with a very easy way. |
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Search Engine Optimization is probably the most important aspect of website
design.
Many, many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about search engine optimization--the process of giving the search engines what they want to see when they index your site. This page contains the information that you SHOULD know about optimizing your website for the search engines.
The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while optimizing your website. They don't index images, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file -- for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.
There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better treatment in the search engines--and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select.
You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find--those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.
Text Assiduity:
Gerasimos Perentidis
I.T. Manager
Europlanet Communication Informatics
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With simple steps...
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Search Engine Optimization - Let's get started!
To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "BMW 318ci". Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the BMW 318ci.
BMW 318ci.
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Pick a Good Domain Name
This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name matchup in a search engine so that a page of our "BMW 318ci" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:
http://www.bmw318ci.gr
Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for much, just a little. |
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Pick a Good Web Hosting Company
What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons.
The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "shared" IP Address . Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.
But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.
If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If your hosting company does not offer static IP addresses, my advice is that you should change web hosting companies. |
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Figure Out Your Key Word Phrases
Your next step should be to do some homework and figure out what your key word phrases should be for your website pages. You need to make a short list of about 2 or 3 key word phrases for each page of the site you want to optimize. Each phrase should be no more than three or four words. It is okay if the same words are in more than one key word phrase, and it is okay if some of the pages overlap their keyword phrases.
For each page you should wind up with a list of no more than three key word phrases, each less than three or four words long.
Longer phrases are less effective. Single words are often useless. The word "Software" for example, is ignored by many search engines - it is what they call a "stop" word, like "the" or "a" - they just ignore it when you search for it, unless you put it inside quotes. |
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Set up your Meta Tags
There are several "tags" that go into the HTML code for a page of a website. These tags are placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD>. These are invisible to the average person browsing the site but are used by the search engines when they come crawling through your site and index the pages--a process called "spidering". These tags should be present on every page of the website. The most important tags are:
- The <title> tag
- and the "description" <meta> tag.
The "keyword" <meta> tag used to be important but is basically useless now.
Set up your <Title> Tag
Our site would contain a <title> tag like this:
<title>BMW 318ci Accessories</title>
What we put in here is based on the key word phrases we figured out above. It should contain our main key word phrase, "BMW 318ci" at least once. It shouldn't contain more than 60 characters. In fact, if you can make it seven words or less (discounting words like "and" and "for", which the search engines ignore anyway) you're better off.
The <title> tag must contain the main keyword phrase for which you are optimizing that page. AltaVista, one of the bigger search engines, mainly uses the title of the page and the domain name when displaying search results. A search at AltaVista for BMW 318ci would almost certainly pull up this page near the top of the results, just based on what we've done so far. Google also places heavy emphasis on the <title> tag. |
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Set up your Meta Keyword Tag
The <meta> keyword tag will contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:
<meta name="keywords" content="BMW 318ci, automobile accessories, aftermarket, hood ornaments, floor mats, auto parts, blah, blah, blah">
Don't make this more than about 250 characters long. Don't use the same key word more than three times in it. Vary the capitalization. Don't use all capital letters unless the word is an acronym, like " SEO ", which is short for Search Engine Optimization .
Note: Don't obsess about the keywords tag. It is mostly disregarded nowadays due to abuse by people stuffing keywords that didn't belong into it. Only AltaVista bothers to index it right now, and I wouldn't count on that continuing for much longer. You can almost skip it entirely. |
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Set up your Meta Description Tag
The <meta> description tag is a description of the page. It should contain our key word phrases for the specific page we are on:
<meta name="description" content="BMW 318ci accessories, blah, blah, blah">
This tag should describe the specific page it is on, not the whole website. This is the description of the page that shows up at the search engine when someone is lucky enough to find this page in his search. Don't make the description more than about 200 characters long. Make it descriptive, and make sure it contains your key word phrases!
We won't repeat individual key words more than twice in any one meta tag because that can get a site banned from a search engines for something called "spamdexing", which is "spamming" the index of a search engine. |
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Put Key Words in Headings
Back to our BMW 318ci site: It will have "headings" like the one at the top of this section. It was created using heading tags that look like this: <H4>Put Key Words in Headings</H4>.
These "headings" make your browser display the text larger and set it aside from the rest of the text, on its own line. Search engines will look for and index our headings when they index the pages on our site, so our headings should ALSO contain the main key word phrases for our site, like this:
- <h1>BMW 318ci</h1>
- <h2>BMW 318ci - Hood Ornaments</h2>
- <h2>BMW 318ci - Maintenance Manuals</h2>
- <h2>BMW 318ci - Floor Mats</h2>
- and so on through as many headings (in this case our products for sale) as we can think of that we want to include on that page.
Headings like that are weighted heavily in the search engines -- many of them use a formula that LIKES the key words in headings more than elsewhere in the site. Don't neglect these. Use them to set off areas of text, in the same way this page you are reading is divided up by headings.
Note: Some people detest using headings because they tend to be big clunky elements in web designs, and they can add a lot of space down the page. You can easily bypass this using a simple inline style command, like this:
<H1 style="margin-bottom: 0px; font-size: 12px;">This will make a small heading with no space after it!</H1>
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Use Key Words in Your Text
Our optimized page would contain TEXT of at least 250 words, with the key word phrase "BMW 318ci" occurring several times near the beginning of the text. If a page doesn't contain at least 250 words, some search engines won't bother to index it. It's preferable to have 500 words or more if possible, on a page. You'll get better results from the search engines if you have more text.
It also seems to help to put the key word phrase near the end of the text, too. Search engines use a factor called "key word density" to determine how relevant that key word you're using is to the page. If it shows up a few times in the text, it is more "dense". Key word density is a good thing, up to a certain point. The main thing is to make sure you have some text that describes what you do or what you're selling- that makes your page a resource worth indexing.
In the HTML code for the page, the text should be as close to the beginning of the page as possible, because there is a limit to how far down into a page a search engine spider will go to try to find text. It is generally agreed that this is 3kb. That's only about 80-100 lines of code! So make sure your text comes before some really long JavaScript menu in the code for the page, or else the search engine won't make it far enough into the page to index the text. They'll never see the text if it is buried way down at the end of the code. |
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Put Key Words in Alt Tags
Pictures on a website can and should contain a little text description that only shows up when you move your mouse over the picture. That little description is called an "ALT tag" ("ALT" is short for "alternate"). Hold your mouse over the picture on the right for a couple of seconds and your browser will display the ALT tag for the picture.
Some search engines index those ALT tags, so we will make sure we label every picture with an ALT tag--every last picture. Wherever it is possible and appropriate, each ALT tag will contain our main key word phrase--"BMW 318ci".
Note: Some people surf with "pictures" turned off, to speed up their browsing. The visually handicapped also use the ALT tags to "see" what's on a picture--there is special software for the blind which reads aloud to the person what's on the page. If there are no alt tags, the pictures are invisible to them, so it is worthwhile to put an alt tag on every picture. If you can appropriately place some key words in those alt tags, so much the better.
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Put Key Words in Anchor Tags
Hypertext links on your site usually look something like this:
<a href="floor-mats.html">. Those are called "anchor tags" -- that's what the "a" stands for. You can put some other information in there, which will show up when one mouses over the link. It would look like this:
Sample Anchor Tag:
<a href="blah.html" title="BMW 318ci floor mats"> BMW Floor Mats </a>
-- if the link points to the floor mats page. When someone mouses over the link, they will see what you put in the title. These "titles" for the anchor tags get indexed by the search engines. Every little bit helps! Make sure the words that you wrap the anchor tag around are keywords, too, whenever possible. |
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Optimizing a Frames-Built Website
If you have a frames-built website, you probably won't like our advice: If your website was built using frames, re-design it so it no longer uses frames.
We know that is harsh advice, but rather than pull punches and do workarounds that don't work all that well, you might as well know that, in our experience, any website that has been fully optimized for the search engines has done away with using frames. To get the best rankings in as many search engines as possible, it is a necessity to re-design the site and get rid of the frames entirely.
Most search engines (and there are exceptions) will not read any further into your site than your index.html page if the site is built in frames. They don't look at the information which is called for and displayed by the frames themselves. The search engines only look at the info between the <noframes> and </noframes> tags on that page.
So, what CAN you do if you are determined to stick with frames?
Put in a <noframes> tag in the <HEAD> of your main frame page, and cram it with what amounts to a whole web page worth of text, headings, alt tags, links, and so on. Put the same things in the noframes tag that we advise you to put in a normal web page.
For best Search Engine Optimizing results, build a <noframes> tag that contains duplicates of the text, headings, meta tags and alt tags (basically everything on a normal web page).
In other words, build a basic web page INSIDE the <noframes> tag that contains all the points we mention on our Search Engine Optimizing page.
If you are going to do that, however, be warned that it is more trouble than simply re-designing the website to do away with Frames entirely. Hence our advice: Redesign the website to do away with frames. |
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How to Optimize Database-Driven Website
There are problems optimizing a website for the search engines, where the pages of that site are created from pieces pulled from a database. If you use cgi, Cold Fusion, Microsoft ASP, or other various proprietary shopping carts like xCart -- these make the kind of web pages where the URL (as you see it in your browser's address bar) contains question marks ("?") or other symbols. The links within this kind of website don't go to existing html pages. The links are set up so that when you click on them, the pages are created instantly for you from information and HTML code stored in a database on the server. It is all put together for you instantly "on the fly" when you click on the link.
Basically, search engine spiders aren't smart enough to figure out how to interact with a database to create those pages, so someimtes they never make it past the first page of the site. While indexing your site and trying to follow the links from your main page, if a search engine spider finds a question mark in the URL that you are linking to, the spider will disregard that link and move on. If your whole site is built this way, the busy spider leaves your site without being able to index anything.
None of the search engines can interface directly to your database and read what is in it -- they just aren't set up to do that.
If you have a database-driven site then special actions need to be taken handle the behavior of the search engine spiders. We do not cover them in detail on this page, this is just an outline of what you need to do:
The main (home) page of the site should link to several static pages (which will need to be created if they don't already exist) which then interact with the database. It helps to have about a dozen of these static (non-changing) pages: these are .html pages which are NOT created by the database "on the fly". Typically they would describe the main categories of what you are selling. The links FROM these "category" pages can create other pages based on information pulled from the database, but these static category pages themselves should not be created newly every time someone clicks a link from the main page of the site.
Each of these static category HTML pages should then be optimized using the appropriate key word phrases for that category. These static HTML pages will then be picked up and indexed by the search engines. You stand a much better chance of getting good search engine rankings for your website by creating and optimizing static pages like this.
There are other more technical ways to handle it, some of which involve changes to the configuration of the server, and there are various software solutions which will make your site look more friendly to a search engine -- but this method of making some static "category" pages is usually the simplest to implement and meets with the least resistance from your webmaster. The other methods depend upon whether one is using ColdFusion, CGI scripts, ASP, or some other method of displaying the information from your database on your web pages.
Do not hesitate to contact our company to help you and guide you for the appropriate changes to make your Websites Search engine "friendly".
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Use a Robots Meta Tag
Put this:
<META NAME="robots" content="index,follow">
between the <HEAD> and the </HEAD> in your HTML code. This will ensure that the search engine spider (or robot) indexes the page and then crawls all the links to the other pages within your site. If you don't want the page indexed for some reason, put content="noindex,nofollow" in the tag instead.
If you use a JavaScript-based menu system on your site, some of the search engines can't follow the links within the JavaScript. So put a simple textual navigation menu (like the one at the bottom of this page) on all your pages. It makes it easier for people to navigate your site, and it makes it possible for the robots to follow the links from one page to another within the site. |
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Use a "robots.txt" file
Make an empty file. Name it "robots.txt". Put it in the root directory of your server; usually this is the same directory where your index.html file is kept. (But not always - sometimes your index.html file is in a sub-directory. In which case, make sure you have a copy of the robots.txt file in the root directory - usually the root directory is as high as you can go in the directory tree on your server.
While it is possible to set up a "robots.txt" file to exclude some or all of the search engine robots -- what you probably want it to do is to allow every robot that comes along to index your site. If you do want to exclude specific robots from indexing certain directories or certain files, you will have to put some commands into the robots.txt file. If you want every robot to be able to index your site, just leave the robots.txt file completely empty -- but make sure it is there!
Experience has taught me that on some servers, it is wisest to put something in that robots.txt file and put it in both the root directory and in the directory where your index.html file is located. This text works inside the robots.txt file, to allow robots to access everything except what is noted:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /tmp/
Disallow: /private/
That example lets the robots coming to your site index everything except what is in your cgi-bin directory, your tmp directory, and your private directory.
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Validate your HTML code
Everybody knows that robots, in general, are not too smart. The search engine robots which gather information from your site can really only do two things: 1. Read text. 2. Follow links. That's all.
These days, modern browsers are much, much smarter than robots. So while you may be able to look at a page using the latest version of Netscape or Internet Explorer, the search engine robots are too dumb to see anything at all if there is a big error in your HTML code. If you have an unclosed HTML tag - for example if you have complicated nested tables, any of which aren't closed -- then that may be the point where the search engine robot gives up trying to read your site.There's plenty of advice there on how to make your HTML code validate. If you or your webmaster can't figure out how to make your HTML code valid, we can help with that.
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Register by Hand.
As soon as the website is finished and up on the web, it should be submitted to (registered with) the search engines (like AltaVista) and directories (like Yahoo!). Most of these are free -- some of them charge for submitting your website. Don't scrimp here. If people can't find your site it is doomed.
There are several programs that can automate this process for you -- but we don't recommend them because, in our experience, they do not get results as good as you get when you register your website by hand.
Then it will take some time (expect it to take several months) for the search engines to actually index and begin listing our site. Some of them only take a day or two, others take months. We have to be patient. But eventually we would be highly placed in a search for "BMW 318ci", on the first page of the search results in most of the search engines. We could expect to be the first result on some of them for our keyword search for our keywords, "BMW 318ci"! |
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Get Links Pointing To Your Site
After our website is created and put up on a server and registered with the search engines, we would then go out and find as many other websites as possible that might have an interest in linking from their site to ours, contact them and convince them to set up such links. We might have to offer reciprocal links back to their sites in order to convince them. There's no harm in that, you WANT lots of links from your site to other sites--that's one easily-provided free service you can give away.
Don't bother with the Free For All Links pages. FFA links pages don't work, and no one actually uses them. You want websites that are similar to yours, or which provide related services, or which contain specialty listings or directories of your type of business.
The rule is: The more links there are to our site, the more relevance it will have in some search engine results and the better placement it will get. A lone website with no links to it is a sad thing. It has no friends. Get plenty of links to your site. Ten links to your site is a good start. A thousand wouldn't be too many.
There are several places online where you can work with other webmasters and site owners to get links TO your site. These include Link Partners a free service, Links Manager (a paid service), and Links-Pal with some free and some paid linking services.
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Summary
In a perfect world, no other site could receive higher placement in a search for "BMW 318ci " unless the designer of it did exactly as we have done above, only more of it! In THIS not-too-perfect world, our website might get dropped out of a search engine for no good reason because of human error or a glitch in a program somewhere. Murphy's Laws can't be avoided, even on the web. Or another site that should get kicked out of the search engine for "spamdexing" might not get kicked out. (You've seen this kind of thing when you do a search and the same site comes up 50 times in the first 60 results, obscuring all the other relevant sites.)
For help in optimizing your website for the search engines, contact us . It's our specialty and a niche we fell into because too many website designers have not studied up on how the search engines work. |
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