Written on April 29th, 2010 by tasha
#2 in a series on how to boost your presence in a search engine result.
The first, easily overlooked factor in search engine optimization, is to make sure that your website is search-engine-friendly. If you understand how search engines work, then you can tip the scale in your favor to be sure that you are highly visible and easy for them to index.
Google and the other search engines do not have a room full of knowledgeable experts in elder care reviewing and ranking your website based on the actual credibility and professionalism of the content. This is too subjective and would be way too expensive.
Instead, search engines use “spiderbots” to “crawl the web” and index all the pages they come across. These are automated data collectors that follow the links from one page to another, counting and cataloguing all kinds of information. (Computers cannot make judgment calls well, but they can count!)
On a rudimentary level, the things that they catalogue on each of your pages include:
- The words in your articles. They want to know what the page is about so they count each word and how often it appears and where it appears. (Words in the title, in headings, subheads and in links to your page are a good indication that the page is about those topics.)
- Links on other pages that bring people TO your page. The more in-coming links to a page, the better. If other websites link to yours, that is equivalent to a cyberspace word of mouth recommendation.
Simple strategies to improve your visibility to the search engines are:
- Have lots of in-coming links. Since the spiderbots follow links, you want lots of other websites to link to your site. This makes it easy for the spiders to crawl over your way when they are finished with the other sites. (In future posts we’ll talk about other reasons to get other websites to link to yours.)
- Reduce or eliminate downloadable .pdf files. Spiderbots are only able to read text. Since content is king, you want the spiderbots to see all your content. The biggest error I find with elder care sites is that the educational materials are often made available as downloadable files. Of course, this is easiest for you. You’ve written your article in Word and converting it to a .pdf is a snap. But you will gain no “Google points” for all that hard work. That content is invisible to the spiderbots. You need to post your content as text on your web pages in order for the spiderbots to see it.
- Use text links instead of buttons or images for links. Although a button or an image can make for a very pretty website, links that are a part of graphics or “movies” (e.g., Flash files) are invisible to spiderbots. In the quest for the flashiest website, many graphic designers will create a navigation bar that sensitively and fluidly responds to the mouse rolling over a graphic. But if your navigation is embedded in these fancy images and graphics, the spiderbots get to your home page and are, from their text-path point of view, effectively at a dead end. Phooey! The depth of your site is in the interior pages.
- Provide a site map. At a minimum, this page will have all the links to all the other pages on your site. Label the page as the Site Map. The spider bots are programmed to look for this page.
What have you done to make your website more search-engine friendly?
Tags: search engine optimization
Posted in Internet Marketing
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