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Setting
Up A Web Site
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Web Hosting Considerations
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Search Engine Considerations
Search
Engine Considerations
Okay,
so now you have your web site up and running, and you have put your
URL on every piece of stationery, marketing material, e-mail, etc.
How do you get targeted visitors to find you?
One
answer is search engines.
According
to a July 1999 study published in Nature, there are approximately
800 million indexable pages on the web. According to SearchEngineWatch,
as of Aug. 3, 1999, even the largest search engine index by FAST
covers only 25%. Still, 200 million pages represent a lot of competition
for the attention of surfers.
How
do you distinguish yourself from among the pages that are indexed?
We've
all gotten the 16,783 matches to our key words. We glance at the
first few pages of matches to see if any really do apply and we
skip over the ones that don't give enough information, hey there
are 16,000 more to look at. Many pages don't get ranked properly
or searchers skip them because of meager information.
Factors That
Affect Search Engine Results
Key
rule: all the search engines are different. Plus they change their
scheme frequently. In a nutshell, this is my understanding of what
affects search results. You might want to address each of them if
you want to maximize results.
- Not
all search engines support frames, nor do all browsers for that
matter. You need to take advantage of the <noframes> tags
not only for search engines, but also for visitors with browsers
that don't support them. Tip: Place navigation links to your pages
at the bottom or have a link to a No Frames version listing all
the pages.
- <meta>
descriptions and keywords are supported by all the major search
engines but they don't necessarily impact your rank—they are not
the secret recipe.
- Capitalization
counts with some search engines, but most searchers enter key
words in lower case. Tip: Use lowercase for <meta> tag keywords.
- Some
search engines don't support image maps; they only index the HTML
text. Tip: Try to have key words, phrases, or description of your
site somewhere as text, for example at the bottom of the page,
below the visible area of the screen.
- All
the major search engines index the full visible body text.
In contrast, comments, <meta> tags, and <alt> tags
are not visible.
- Some
search engines support <alt> text used in image links. Tip:
For the benefit of search engines and visitors, include
the <alt> tag for all your images. For example,
<a href="http://www.asme.org/sections/pgh">ASME
Pgh <img src="../images/asmelogo.jpg" width="50" height="50"
alt="ASME Pgh" border="0"></a>.
- Some
search engines take into consideration link popularity to rank.
If other sites link to you, then you must have interesting content.
Making the
most of Meta Tags
Okay,
this is where you may have to touch the HTML code. It's not that
bad.
This
may seem obvious, but make sure your company name and primary product
or service appears either in HTML text or in a <meta> tag.
This is especially important if you have a splash page consisting
only of an image.
The
<meta> tags are placed in the document header, between the
<head>
and </head>
tags. Here are some points on using <meta> tags.
Title
Example:
<title>This is the
title of the page</title>
- This
is the text displayed in the browser's title bar, in search results,
and in the header/footer of a printout.
- This
is the most important tag since searchers could base their decision
to visit the site depending on the title. If it is too ambiguous,
they could easily move on, I do.
- Give
as descriptive a title as you can, include: company name, topic,
key identifying characteristic, etc.
- Search
engines place a high value on the content of the <title>
tag for relevancy. If key words in your title match the search
words that a searcher is using, then your page will be ranked
higher.
- If
you don't have a title, some search engines will simply put "Untitled."
I don't know about anyone else, but I skip those. There are simply
too many other choices.
- Don't
make the title too long. Some search engines penalize for this.
The major engines only display between 60-115 characters, avg.
71 characters.
Description
Example:
<meta
name="description" content="This page is about…">
- The
description lets you control what is displayed with a search result.
- Search
engines will display between 130-395 characters, avg. 225 characters.
Lead with the essentials, the rest might be truncated.
- Tip:
Create the content of your description in a word processor that
counts characters, in MS Word 97, you can get this information
with File > Properties > Statistics.
Keywords
Example:
<meta name="keywords"
content="primary service, secondary service, tradename">
- The
keywords tag is meant to make up for relevant text that doesn't
appear on your page. These are the words that searchers would
use to locate your page. Include: services, products, target markets,
competitors (yes, competitors, if surfers are looking for their
goods and services, they might be interested in yours too), location,
abbreviations, etc.
- The
keywords tag is particularly helpful if you have mostly images
on your page.
- Use
phrases, single words will only get you 273,526 in the list of
matches. Exceptions might be proper nouns such as single word
company names and city names.
- Use
lowercase because that's what most searchers enter. You can place
every variation of capitalization in your keywords tag, but some
search engines consider this spamming. Too much repetition may
be considered a way of tricking the search engines to get placed
higher in the rankings.
For
more information on <meta> tags: http://www.searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html.
Submitting
your URLs to search engines
You
can hire another company to submit your URL to the search engines,
or you can do it yourself.
Submission
services will either manually or automatically submit your site.
Many site submission services tout a long list of search engines
and directories. The automatic submission services generally do
not confirm a listing—they only submit.
Handling
the submission process yourself lets you customize your entries.
Some search engines/directories (ex: Yahoo) ask you to categorize
yourself; you know best what category your site belongs. Taking
care of the popular search engines will cover a majority of the
exposure to searchers.
- Some
search engines will ask for a title and description of your site.
Have them ready. If you created the <meta> tags, then you
already have these.
- Some
search engines ask for your main URL, while others let you submit
more than one page. If you are allowed, submit 2-3 main pages,
ex: main page and site contents. This way, if the spider somehow
has trouble with one page, you have backups. Submission of more
pages is not necessarily better. (A spider catalogs your site
for indexing.)
- Some
search engines/directories categorize sites and ask you to submit
your site from the appropriate page, ex: Yahoo. Search for similar
sites first so you can determine how you want to be categorized.
This is where it is advantageous to submit your own site.
- Give
it anywhere between two to six weeks to be indexed, if you don't
find yourself indexed, resubmit.
- Check
for your URL periodically, you may need to resubmit. Sometimes
URLs are lost or never indexed.
Popular
search engines and directories to submit your site
- AltaVista,
http://www.altavista.com/.
- Excite,
http://www.excite.com/
- Go/Infoseek,
http://www.go.com/
- HotBot,
http://www.hotbot.com/
- Lycos,
http://www.lycos.com/
- MSN
Search, http://search.msn.com/
- Northern
Light, http://www.northernlight.com/
- Open
Directory, http://dmoz.com/
- Snap,
http://www.snap.com/
- Yahoo,
http://www.yahoo.com/.
If
you can find search engines that target your market, so much the
better. You should certainly submit your site there.
Resources
on Search Engines and Directories
Want
to know more? For a deeper understanding of search engines, go to
Search Engine Watch http://www.searchenginewatch.com/.
There are excellent detailed discussions—everything you ever wanted
to know about search engines.
For
webmaster links, see the Online Resources page, http://www.isolns.com/online.htm.
For
links on searching the Internet, see the Research Resources page,
http://www.isolns.com/research.htm.
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