Website Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Basics

Before going into the details of creating search engine friendly sites, it is first useful to understand how search engines index websites.

1. A search engine visits a site with an automated program called a spider. A spider is a program that downloads the site's pages ready for the search engine to process.
2. After the spider has acquired the site's page content, the search engine passes the content to a program called an indexer. The indexer analyses the page for keywords, the title, links and other important content.
3. Based on certain acceptance criteria, the search engine then adds the site to its database and makes it available to searchers.

Building a Search Engine friendly website

There are many factors to consider when building a search engine friendly web site. A list of the most important points is given below:

• Try to plan and build as much quality content as you can before publishing your site.
• Carefully build your webpages ensuring that you add keywords into each page title, use the correct H1, H2, p tags, provide ALT text for images etc..
• Try to build a site map for your site, search engines can use this page to work out all of your page links.
• Try to get other quality sites to link to your site. Search engines such as Google rank pages based on the number of other pages that link through to it. This will also help the spiders to find your site.
• When you come to publish your site, use a stand-alone I.P. address, don't use virtual hosting. This makes it far easier for spiders to find your site.
• The simpler the site design, the better. Text content should far outweigh HTML content and you should try to avoid Flash, Java and JavaScript.
• Validate the individual pages with HTML validator, such as the one found at W3C. Validated pages can be more easily processed by search engine indexers.
• Try to keep page sizes as small as possible, aim for 15-20K.
• Spell check your page content, this is becoming more important for search engines.
• From every page, link to one or two high ranking sites under the keyword you're trying to emphasise.
• For all page links, try to use the fully qualified URL, e.g. http://www.google.com. This makes it easier for spiders to follow page links. Avoid the use of JavaScript when performing page navigation.

Search Engine Submissions

When you are happy with initial content of you website, it is time to submit it to the major search engines for spidering. The following list of URLs provides a good starting point for search engine submissions:

• Google Submission Page
• DMOZ Submission Page
• Yahoo Submission Page
• Ask Jeeves Webmasters page

Remember to be patient when sumitting your URL. Some search engines will not visit your site for at least 4 weeks.

Content, Content, Content

After submitting your site to the search engines the effort doesn't stop there. It is imperative that you continue adding quality content to the site. A minimum of 100 pages should be aimed for. Consider writing articles about your business or industry, Q&A pages or back issues of an online newsletter.