| There
a millions of web sites on the Internet, with 1000's
more being added every day.
One of the best ways of finding any of these web sites
is by using search engines, but you type anything into
a search engine you are likely to get 1000's of search
results, and how many times do you look beyond the second
page of search results? Not very often I guess.
Well what you need to do is to try and get your web
site listed as high as possible in the results and there
are a number of things you can do to help.
Page Title
Make sure each page on your web site has a title in
the head of the document. Many search engines use the
title of the web page as the link to your site, so it
is important that your title be as relevant and descriptive
as possible.
To see how many Untitled Documents there are out there,
all you need to do is type Untitled Document into a
search on Google, when I tried it returned 12,400,000
search results. When you look at the pages found, Untitled
Document, is not going to make you want to visit that
page.
It is best to use the title for your page that describes
the content of your page as much as possible in the
most descriptive way. For example, if you were looking
for a page that sells Crystal Wine Glasses and the search
engine title for the page said Glasses it could mean
the page contained anything from Sunglasses to Beer
Glasses.
Page Content
A number of search engines will index the first few
lines of your web page, so try to make a the first few
lines as descriptive as possible.
Some search engines will even index your entire page.
To try and trick search engines some people enter hundreds
of keywords into the bottom of the page but in the same
colour as the background so they can't be seen by the
user, but they can by the search engine spider. This
is known as spamming and many search engines are clever
enough these days to see this and will actually put
your site lower in the listings or black list it altogether.
Hyperlinks
Try to place as many descriptive text links in your
homepage to other relevant pages in your site as possible
as search engines will use these links to index the
other pages on your site.
Images
Most sites these days contain images, so it is important
that you use the alt tag on any images to try and describe
as much as possible what the image is of. Not only will
this help index your site better but it will also help
those visitors to your site who are visually impaired.
Where possible try not to use images that contain text
as what maybe easily visible to you won't be able to
be indexed by a search engine.
Links to Your Site
Many search engines, including Google, will return your
web site higher in search results by the amount of web
sites that link to your site, also the higher the profile
of the site that links to yours, the higher your listing
is in search results again.
With this in mind it is worth searching the Internet
for other web sites on the same topic as your own. Many
of these sites will have link pages and even if they
don't its worth asking the web site owner if they could
link to your web site.
The more links to your site the better as I find many
sites get more visitors from other sites linking to
them than come through search engines anyway.
Sites Using Frames
Frames tend to cause search engine spiders allot of
problems when indexing your site as many won't recognise
the document that opens up your frames and so wont index
your pages.
To help over come this problem place your main homepage
into the noframes part of the document that opens all
your frames. The noframes part of the page is for those
browsers that can't handle frames, but as most nowadays
do your web site visitors will never see what is in
this part of the document.
To help index other pages on your site it is also worth
placing links in the noframes part of the document as
this will allow the search engine spider to find other
pages on your site and index them.
Frames do cause allot of problems and not just when
indexing your site, what happens if someone clicks onto
a link which takes them into only one frame on your
site, they may not be able to view any navigation controls
and so will not be able to go to other parts of your
site. I would recommend, where possible not to use a
frames on your site. |
