Search Engine Optimization

How will people find your website once it is online? It’s not an easy question to answer. You may include your website in your traditional advertising or send announcements to your current customers, but how can you make your website reach beyond your regular audience? When your potential customers go looking for a business on the web they often start with a search site like Google, Yahoo, or MSN Search. When you first try to find your site though, it may get lost in a great list of others from around the country and the world. Many search engines will allow you to pay for special placement, but you can also affect how your site places in regular searches. The process of editing your site to provide you with the best possible placement is known as Search Engine Optimization or SEO.

 

Search Engine Optimization is not a simple matter. There is no magic button to press to have your site come out at the top of a search (aside from paying for special placement).   The actual formula which the search engines use to calculate placement is a careful kept secret and is constantly updated to prevent people from taking advantage of it. Presented here are some strategies for preparing your site for search engines.

 

Keep in mind that the information below is only a suggestion made by people who are not experts in the field and are therefore not guaranteed to give your site a top ranking on any search engine. For best results we recommend that you contact an SEO specialist who can help fine-tune your site.

 

The first step in optimizing your site is selecting appropriate keywords. These keywords should be appropriate to your site and you should do research to figure out which of these words are most likely to be used in searches that people make on the web.

 

There are many tools available to help you select and refine your list of keywords. Some of these tools can be found on the web:

 

Do a search for yourself; it’s probably a good thing if they show up near the top of the list themselves.

 

These keywords are the starting point for everything you will do to optimize your site. These are not only the terms that people will actually type into the search engine, but related terms that will help identify the suitability of your site.

 

For example: We want to optimize the Creative Constructs website so that people looking for Web Developers in Western Massachusetts will find our website on Google. After doing a thorough analysis of potential keywords, we find that web development sites often include terms like “HTML”, “CSS”, and “Javascript” (all technologies commonly used in Web site development). By including these terms as keywords for our site, Google is more likely to recognize our site as being related to Web development.

 

Once you have a list of keywords, it is important that your web pages include as many of these terms as often as possible without disrupting the flow of the text. In the first example below we provide a small amount of information common to small businesses. In the second example we replace the simple information with a description of our location tailored to match keywords for searchers who may be looking for a developer in their area.

 

A Poor Example:

 

A Better Example:

 

 Hopefully now people searching for a web developer in Springfield, Hartford and Boston will have a chance of finding out site.

 

There is, of course, more to writing your site than cramming in keywords. It is important to balance keyword inclusion with readability and to avoid allowing your site to become cluttered.

 

Many people ignore the title of a page, and some don’t even know it is possible to change, but it is one of the more important places to put your keywords. The page title appears on the top of the browser window above the menus.

 

 

Keywords in the page title appear to count even more than words in the text of a page.

 

The page description won’t appear when you view a web page, and keywords in the description are not weighted as heavily as in some other places, but the page description is used by some search engines to describe your site when it does appear in the rankings.

 

It may seem redundant, but there is a way to embed a set of keywords for a page that the search engines will look for. This does not replace using the keywords in the page text or in the title and description of a page, but it does provide some extra weight to terms that are already present. Words included in the keywords list that do not appear elsewhere in the site will be ignored, so this cannot be used to fool search engines.

 

Search engines find your site and the individual pages on your site by reading links from other sites (or other pages on your site) and following them. The text used in these links factors into your ranking. In the examples below the first is a poor example because there is no descriptive information aside from the name of the company.

 

This is a Link

Creative Constructs

 

This next example is a stronger indicator for the search engine because it is more descriptive about what the linked to page offers.

 

This is a Better Link

Creative Constructs: Website Development, Content Management Systems
and E-Commerce in Western Massachusetts

 

Finally, the context of the link in the page appears to count. This means that a link to a web development company on a page about web development will be more meaningful than a link in an unrelated context.

 

This is Better Yet

Help your business with a new website! 

Whether you want to reach new audiences with a web based marketing plan, 

or sell your products, websites can be a powerful and cost effective 

solution for your business. We recommend:

Creative Constructs: Website Development, Content Management Systems
and E-Commerce in Western Massachusetts

 

 

Links within your site are important, but even more so are links from other websites. Both the quantity and quality of links from external sources are important to your ranking, and the higher ranked a site that contains a link to your site is, the more it will count.

One more thing that can affect your ranking is the URL of the page. In the example http://www.creativeconstructs.com/contact.cfm, the filename is “contact.cfm”. The word “Contact” will be given greater weight for this page accordingly so that if someone searches for “Creative Constructs contact information” they will be more likely to be directed directly to the contact page. This also holds true for directory names, so http://www.creativeconstructs.com/contact/index.cfm will also recognize “Contact” as a keyword.

A number of tools exist that promise to allow you to submit your site to search engines. These tools range from free, one time services to monthly subscriptions that will resubmit your information on a regular basis to make sure that it is always up to date. One such tool can be found at http://freewebsubmission.com/, but remember, this does not take the place of Search Engine Optimization. Submission should come after your site has been optimized so that the search engines will properly rank your site.

 

MakeEZ is a powerful Content Management System and is specially designed to accommodate SEO. The easy editing tools will allow you to keep your text up to date so that you can adjust your site when your keywords change. Page titles, descriptions and keywords can be set for each page and site defaults can be set to ease the burden of editing large sites. Even file names are within your control.