Search engines and SEO

Depending on your competition, to be ranked where you need to be is tough. This subject gets very complicated and there are many variables to take into consideration, so consider this an overview, but hopefully with some useful tips.

We'll use our website as an example in this blog and let you know some of our tricks.

So you have developed your website or someone else has developed it for you.

Now you want it to be placed somewhere in Google, Yahoo or similar. You are not sure but think it’s pretty simple to obtain a natural search engine ranking. (We will explain "Natural Ranking" in a minute).

You start to evaluate your site and find out it sucks because search engine ranking was not taken into account during the initial planning phase. It’s ok though, there is hope.

There are 3 basic things you need to know:

1) You can and should submit your website to the major directories. http://dmoz.org and Yahoo are our favorites. Dmoz is free and you have to pay Yahoo $300 or so. There are many other directories. After you submit to these guys your site is reviewed by a real human. Make sure you follow their rules closely.

Submitting your site to directories is relatively easy. As an example go to http://dmoz.org then do a search with your full domain name to see if you are already indexed.

If your site does not show up, from the front page of Dmoz browse to the closest and deepest category that matches your site. When you get there click the link “add url” and submit your information.

2) Pay-Per-Click.

You can sign up with companies such as Corporate Pages Pay Per Click and depending on how you define your search terms and how much you wish to pay, be placed on the first page for your defined key word.

When you pay for inclusion your ad will appear with a label next to it indicating it was sponsored. We'll not be covering Paid Inclusion much in this blog.

Our overall consensus here in the office is that's its too costly and does not generate enough revenue. That depends on your competition of course.

3) Site integrity:

If your website has been carefully planned from inception with the Search Engines in mind you stand a good chance of being Naturally Ranked.

This is where the focus of this blog lies.

To develop your site for placement you must at the very least do these things:

Look up the competition -In our case it’s huge. We sell hosting plans and domain names amongst other things. We need to be ranked somehow amongst 400,0000 others trying to do the same thing.

Before you design your website you must become a bot - A bot is a software application. The Googlebot (as an example), will visit your site and crawl it. Crawling means it starts at the top and works its way down the page and its looking for something specific in the source code.

Depending on what it finds determines where your site will be ranked in Google. We will use the Googlebot here but there are many bots that will visit your site unless you tell them not to (well get into that later).

The bots will not be looking at the page the way you do. They'll have a different view. If you go to your website in Explorer then click view > then source, you will see the site through the bots eyes. So have a look at it or someone else’s site for ideas.

The bot arrives at your site from another site linking to your site or it arrives there because you told it to by submitting your site or it finds it from external links. In Google if the bot arrives from a site in the same category as yours and that site is already well ranked you will get a better ranking.

To see Google ranking statistics download the Googlebar and enable page ranking. You can see the rank of any page you visit. Go to Google and search for the Googlebar download.

The bot will analyze your main directory looking for a small file called robot.txt. This is a file where you can specify any pages you don't want ranked. It will also look in the head of the page for META instructions. If the bot cannot find these things it gets to work.

The bot will scan the head of your html document looking at the meta tags.

Before we move forward its time for your first tip:

Define the key words you think someone might search for to get your site to come up. If you have much competition try defining a key phrase. Use the key words in you meta title and description. Use the same key words in your copyright as much as you can and as close to the top of the page as you can get them. Try to put key words near relative links.

The bot likes these things:

Uncluttered sites that load quickly

Full url's even to links in the same site

Links with alt text added

Alt tags utilized behind images

Key word/phrase and key word density and positioning

A well designed site with no html bugs

Key words in Descriptor tags

Incoming links from a high rated site (backlinks)

Heading tags

Use different meta tags accurately describing each page

Choose a domain name with your key word in it

The bots don't like these things:

Spam - don't try to trick the bot it will know and your site will be blacklisted.

Bad html with table tags cluttering (use CSS)

Due to the huge competition we decided to use the phrase “domain names and hosting plans” or “hosting plans and domain names”.

We are now beginning to see results since we redesigned our site using CSS. (We will cover CSS in a future blog).

Obviously we cannot give out all our secrets, but hopefully this overview helped you.

In general a well designed site with fresh interesting information will keep people and bots happy.

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