Search Engine Optimization
| Registering your website at the major search engines is relatively simple. The challenge is making your site appear at the top of the search results list when a shopper searches for an eTailer that sells your products or services. To accomplish this feat, you have to optimize your site for the major search engines. Optimization is more art than science because each search engine uses different search rules. But there are some key things you can do to ensure that your web store does not come up as site number 1,000 in a search results list. Now, there are many books and online services that claim to guarantee top placement in the major search engines if you use their tricks and services. But the search engines regularly change the ways they search the Web, so many of these tricks do not hold true for long. If you really want to learn the current tricks of the search engine trade, visit Search Engine Watch at searchenginewatch.com. Also, SEOChat at www.seochat.com and webmasterworld at www.webmasterworld.com are two other active discussion boards full of invaluable insight into getting better rankings. Tip: Are You Listed in the Search Engines? Some search engines will confirm whether your website is already in their database. Here's a way to find out whether your website is listed in the major search engines. Take a look at the URL-checking information along with many other useful tools at Search Engine Watch: http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/article.php/2167861. Whatever your choice, you need to know the general basics of how search engines search the Web. Each one has a different formula on how it ranks and how you get included into its database. Google, for example, will spider your site for free, whereas others will require a submission fee. The ranking and business inclusion model is always changing. Therefore, you will need to visit each search engine or directory to see how you get your site listed. So what are some of the main things search engines are looking for when cataloging your website?
Let's take a look at them now. It's very important that you take care when creating the page title, page description, page keywords, and the first paragraph of your web pages. The search engines in one way or another will read this text and use it to return a list of search results to web surfers. Don't make the mistake of creating a page title that's good for people but bad for the search engines. Don't use a title for your page such as "mySoftware StoreWe Sell Computer Software." With a title like that, you're asking to be overlooked by the search engines. Create a unique title for each page. Select a handful of keywords that describe your web page and create a title tag that uses them with the most important words first. Placing your keywords in the beginning of the title will also help if the search engine result truncates your title. A good title tag for your page would read
Notice that your company name is near the end of the title tag. Why? Your page description will probably be truncated by the search engine, so you want your most important information on what you offer up front. Another reason for all this verbiage is that the three most important places to have keywords and key word phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words because this will improve your ranking in a search result. Why? Because having all these keywords in all your tags increases your keyword density and improves your rankings. |
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