The following is
some information with regard to improving a web site's presence. This
is only partly a matter of search engine optimization. I should also
mention that each search engine uses its own criteria for ranking a
web site, and that these criteria can change over the course of time.
Page
Titles
Many search engines use page titles
(the captions that appear at the top of a browser window) as the
basis of their indexing, so the more meaningful your title, the more
likely your site will be found. When someone uses one of the search
engines, pages that have the search terms in their titles are often
assumed to be more relevant than others.
When someone adds your web site to
their list of favorite places or 'bookmarks', the bookmark is given
the exact title of your page.
These are the characteristics of a
good web page title:
·
It will specifically describe your product or service.
·
It will make proper use of 3 or 4 keywords.
·
The length will be between 10 and 150 characters long. (One author
recommends between 50 and 70 characters.)
·
The number of words will be less than 10.
META
Tags
A META tag does
not display anything to be read when a person looks at a web page,
but it does contain information that many search engines (though not
all) will use to rate and index pages. The two most commonly used
META tags are the Keywords tag and the Description tag.
Keywords
The Keywords tag will contain key words
and phrases that are relevant to what your business or organization
does. For instance, a home remodeling company would use such phrases
as "home remodeling" and "home improvement".
A search engine will analyze how often
keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with
a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web
pages. A key word or phrase should be used more than three times in
the body of a site's text.
Search engines will also check to see
if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in
the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that
any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from
the beginning.
For optimal results your Keywords tag
should be between 50 and 250 characters long.
Description
The Description tag will contain a
brief description of what your site is about. The description tag
allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers
that support the tag. All the major crawlers support the description
tag, to some degree. If you have a description tag on your pages,
you'll most likely see the content used in some way.
Site
Registration
You can sign up
with a service that will register your site with multiple search
engines; these services are cost effective as well as time savers.
One such service, Traffic Blazer, is provided by GoDaddy.
Submitnet.net is another. A third service, Freewebsubmission.com,
will register your site with 'the highest rated free internet search
engines and directories' at no cost to you.
Link
Exchange
By analyzing how pages link to each
other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and
whether that page is deemed to be important and thus deserving of a
ranking boost. People can improve the rankings of their sites if they
have reciprocal links to other relevant web sites.
Clickthrough
Measurement
A search engine
may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, and
eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks,
while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors.
Social
Media
Social media allow individuals to
exchange news and other information through the worldwide web and
related types of electronic communication. The list of social
media technologies is large, and it is still growing. There are
many providers. People can share text, images, sound recordings
and video footage. A good social media tool, such as a web log,
can attract attention and provide a lot of fresh content to people
when they visit your web site.
Further
Information
A survey by Murphy
Associates, Your Marketing Department, identified what people
particularly like and dislike in websites. Contact John Murphy at
john@MarketingWithMurphy.com
or call (262) 786-7424 to get the results of this survey. I would
also recommend the book Web
Forging by Keith Klein to learn more about improving your
presence on the web. | 
