Getting your website found

Being found on the Internet, also sometimes known as “Search Marketing”, is as many will know, the practice of using keywords and other terms or phrases to guide Web surfers and Web seekers to your site – after all that is why you put it up on the Web, isn’t it? It's the very phenomenon behind Google's extraordinary market capitalization success. It’s also the holy grail of one-to-one communication - the occurrence of when someone raises their hand and says, I am interested in learning more about this subject, or this product category, or this service area." If you were to ask almost any sales professional they will almost certainly say to you that no more qualified, valuable prospects exist on the face of the earth.

All Web site owners and/or businesses really should register words related to their names with search engines like Google. This is especially important for small businesses because search engines like Google and others really do offer a trusted environment to cut through the clutter. Further, with the development of so-called geo-targeting, those organisations who compete on a local or regional basis can even more effectively use search engine marketing.

Contrary to popular belief securing a pre-eminent search position isn't all that complicated; many people and organisations do it all the time – you just need to follow some basic rules: here are a few.

Words, Words, Words – Are they important – isn’t a picture worth a thousand words?

Rule No 1. Sufficient content. Your web site needs to have at least 200 words of keyword-rich text (words to most people) per web page. A search engine will try to determine what your web page is all about or trying to say based on the words you use on the page. A page that's consists mostly of product photos may be very meaningful to someone shopping for those items but unfortunately a search engine will have no way of understanding what's in those pictures—they need a text description of the picture before they can do their jobs.

Your words, text or phrases need to use the keywords that people are going to search for. So if you are someone in the pest exterminator business and your site talks at length about "exterminators", "pest exterminators", "insect extermination", and "rodent infestation," great, the search engines will understand that your site is about those terms. Unfortunately if someone searches for the common phrase "pest control," or “cockroaches” your site will not show up in the search results unless you use those phrases on your site, too.

Keeping things neat and tidy. A place for everything and everything in its place. That’s right isn’t it?

Rule No 2 Using frames. Creating frames is a technique that many Web developers use to simplify their work and to help ensure a consistent appearance in their pages right across the entire web site. For instance a Web designer may have created an outside "frame" that has a top border with say page title, logos and so on. It may also have a left side border that has links or buttons to various other pages on the web site. It will probably have a bottom border with things like company addresses, copyright statement and perhaps a link to a privacy statement or the like. The real substance or "meat" of the pages, that is, where the real content is, is that area enclosed by those borders, and that's the only part that changes as you go from page to page.

Unfortunately, search engines will probably have a great deal of difficulty navigating around in a framed site and may miss adding some of your pages to their listings. The result is inevitably that those pages that are missed will never show up in the search engine results when people search for your keywords.

An even bigger problem can occur when the content pages do show up in the search engine results' pages. That's because when a searcher clicks on the link in the search engine results, it brings them to the content part of the page. Just the content part, which doesn't include the outside frame where site identification appears and where the links are that visitors need to find your contact information or the page where they can place an order. The simplest solution? Simply avoid using frames.

I just keep everything looking glossy and picture perfect – that should fix it?

Rule No 3. Graphics that include text. Because different visitors to your site have different fonts installed on their computers, the only way to ensure that the text on your web pages looks exactly as you want it—the size, font, line breaks and so on—is to include it in a graphic. And often such text looks really great.

Unfortunately, search engines can't tell if that graphic says "REALLY Cheap Widgets" or if it's a photo of your new puppy. Words in graphics are wasted on the search engines. In order to understand that your page is about "really cheap widgets," they need to find those words in plain text on your page.

In a similar fashion, navigation buttons that include words also can't be read by search engines. So what should you do? Include keywords in the links to pages on your site. This will help the search engines understand that those pages are relevant to those words. So either replace your navigation buttons with plain text links to the pages on your site, or supplement them with a redundant set of plain text links somewhere else on your page.

Whew – putting these products on Web pages is hard – think I’ll just put it all in a Database – what do you think?

Rule No 4. Dynamic content. Dynamic web pages are most often found on e-commerce sites that have numerous pages featuring hundreds of products. (Dynamic pages are constructed "on the fly" from a database of product information and can often be identified by the presence of a "?" somewhere in the page address.)

Regrettably, dynamic pages are often ignored by search engines for a number of technical reasons. One way to fix this problem is to create topical pages that aren't dynamic. For example, you may sell many varieties of both tabletop widgets and portable widgets. By creating a static page (a "normal" web page that's not created by your database) for tabletop widgets and another for portable widgets, you can use your essential keywords on those pages and still link to your dynamic pages to display individual products. Your dynamic pages are unlikely to be seen by the search engines, but your static, topical pages describing your selection of tabletop and portable widgets should.

I am a nice person – that should just about do it – everybody will know about me won’t they?

Rule No 5. Link popularity. Almost all the major search engines factor into their rankings some measure of the number and quality of other sites that link to yours. That's a reflection of their belief that good web sites don't link to other web sites that are worthless.

If lots of high quality sites link to your site, the chances are that you have a better site than one without any incoming links. Of course, you might be comparing your well-established site to a brand new site no one knows about yet, but over time, it seems to work out that better sites have more incoming links. And all other things being equal, a site with a lot of incoming links will be ranked higher by the search engines than a site with fewer incoming links. And a site with no incoming links may be dropped entirely from some search engines.

Try to obtain links from web sites that complement yours but that don't compete with you. Investigate directories that list sites in your line of business. And be prepared to offer to link back to those sites in return for a link from them to you.

If you can integrate these 5 critical design advantages, you can avoid earning an abysmal search engine ranking. Being visible on the web is the first step to being found on the web. And while you may still need search engine optimization to obtain rankings in the top three pages of searches on your important keywords, you first need to make sure you're not condemned to page 72 by critical errors.

Arthur Hissey
Computer Research & Technology
www.crt.net.au