March 20th, 2008

Business owners have already recognized the value of a strong web presence, but taking that from a simple brochure to a powerful marketing device can change everything you thought you knew about marketing in a period of just a few months, but you can’t do it alone. You need help from some of the biggest companies in the world, and those are the search engine likes of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL, not to mention all their lesser cousins.

Getting a site to the top of the search engines can be tricky, but the benefits of building your site with those companies in mind will pay off in ways far better than any traditional advertisements, and you can do it while helping people get the information they want, even if they aren’t ready to become your customer just yet.

Convincing a search engine that your site is important and relevant is hard, but if your pages are not built in compliance with their published standards, it can be impossible. A big key to making the search engines work with you is making your site easy for them to “index,” or read and catalog.

SEO Friendly Pages

Whenever you use Flash or images instead of text, specify alternative text so the search engines can still understand what it is.

Start off with a descriptive, relevant headline. This needs to say what the page is going to be about and it should appear separate and in a larger font.

Make sure your ROBOTS file is set to permit access to search engine crawlers. If they aren’t permitted to look at your site, they won’t have any idea what content is there.

Avoid the use of Frames and iFrames, as these are still very confusing to search engines. You may have relevant content that the search engines like, but when readers click through, they’ll find themselves in a small portion of your page, rather than on a real, full-content page.

Making the Most of Meta Headers & Keywords

You may not have noticed this before, but up in the top of every web document is an area of “meta” text. This may include the page’s title, description, language used, keywords, program used to create the page, how soon it will be updated or deleted, and more.

If you didn’t know that exists, odds are it isn’t being utilized fully. The title and description are rarely overlooked, but the keywords often are. Having relevant keywords in here that actually pertain to the page can boost search engine rankings tremendously.

The Keys to the Keywords

Don’t use the same keywords for every single page of your site. Not all pages are about the same things, and recycling the same ones over and over doesn’t help one page over another.

List as many as 20-30 keywords if you can, but make sure they actually apply to the page. Littering it with irrelevant words (commonly used in the past have been celebrity names) can hurt your site more than help it.

Make them specific and descriptive.

If possible, you should tell your webmaster or web designer to make a box in the admin section of your site, so that when you create new pages you can enter the keywords right there. If you have to manually crack in to the code every time you make a new page, it’s going to be far more work than it’s worth.

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