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Maximise your Search Engine Placement If you want more visitors to your site, make use of the search engines to let them know you exist – David Dorn outlines the strategies you should adopt. Consider this; if you’re looking for information out on the WordWide Web, how do you go about finding it? If you’re anything like me, you’ll have a favourite search engine, and you’ll clatter key words into its input box. Now, most surfers are lazy. That’s not meant to be derogatory – it simply points out the fact that the vast majority of people surfing the ‘Net tend to click as little as possible to get to the information they want. So, if your site is included in the search results they’ve got, but it’s on page 14 of 35, you’re not likely to get a visit from them. If it’s on the first couple of pages, though, you’ve got a much better chance. So, how do you go about getting your site to “rank” more highly on the search engines? It’s a quite laborious task, to be truthful, but there are certain things you should be aware of which will help you get a better placement. Americanisms Now, I’m not going to go down the route of telling you that if you’re not highly placed you’ll get no traffic. That’s probably true of a set of keywords, mostly of an, erm, adult nature, but it certainly isn’t true for the majority. So, it’s keywords we need to consider first, alongside your page title and description. Which brings us neatly to the concept of Meta Tags. Look at this lot: <head> <title>Creative Audigy Sound Card</title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"> <meta name=”description” content=”Creative’s Audigy Sound Card reviewed by Ian Waugh”> <meta name=”Keywords” content=”Creative, Audigy, Sound card, direct to disk recording” </head> That’s part of the <head> section of a fairly standard HTML page, with a few of the bits we’re not looking at chopped out of it. See the lines which start with “<meta name=”? They’re the bits we need to look at to start with. The first, though, and the one the search engines always begin with is the page title ( in the “<title>” tag). Title Think of it like a book’s title. You nip off down to the bookstore and look for a book by… Title! Search engines are no different. So, your title needs to describe, as attractively as possible, what the page is about, but – and this is important – succinctly. Just by looking at the title tag in the example above, you know what the piece is about – it’s that clear. Next up is the description meta tag – and this is next in order of importance Description This tag should be nor more than twenty or so words long. It should be an accurate description of what the page contains – a lot like the blurb on the back of a paperback that gives you a précis of the story it contains, but without the hyperbole! Look at the example… <meta name=”description” content=”Creative’s Audigy Sound Card reviewed by Ian Waugh”> It tells you exactly what the page contains – no more, no less. Most search engines will pop up the page description right under the link to the page, so if, in our example, someone is looking for a review of Creative’s latest sound card, they’ll see the description above, and are very likely to click on it. Keywords And then come the keywords. I could write a book on this one, single meta tag. Many sites use “keyword spamming” to attempt to get high rankings on search engines, but I’m certainly not going to recommend you do that. The folks that maintain these search engines are constantly fine tuning how they work, and, believe me, they’re aware of the strategies that folks use to try to subvert their algorithms. While the keyword meta tag used to be very important and easy to abuse, it’s no longer the soft option it was. You now need to use it as it was intended – in other words, as a list of the salient terms that a reader might search on. You decide that by considering what you’ve written, and who it is aimed at. Looking at our example: <meta name=”Keywords” content=”Creative, Audigy, Sound card, direct to disk recording” you might think that there aren’t many keywords there. Well, that’s true, and it’s quite probable that there could be another thirty or so. If you read the actual article (here) you will doubtless be able to see some further keywords that really stand out as being very salient to the search a user who really ought to read the piece might use. And that’s the secret – it’s knowing who you’ve written the piece for – who are you actually trying to attract to read it? If you know your audience, you’ll have a very good idea of what search terms they’ll use, and so you can tailor your keyword list to them. Here’s the thing, though – your keywords absolutely must appear in the text of your article. If they don’t, the top search engines will automatically demote you way down the rankings. For instance, one of the most used search terms is “sex” (there, I’ve said it!). You can doubtless imagine some of the other top rated search terms! Well, you can have them all in your keywords list, but if they don’t appear in the text on the page, you’ll get precisely nowhere. The search engine spiders (the bots that actually index the Web) compare the keywords list in the your meta tags to the text on the page. If they don’t match, your site might just be dropped altogether – it’s called “spamming” the engine – and the engines don’t like it! Tricks One “trick” you can try, though, is to research your keywords before you publish the page or site. In the case of our example, navigate to your favourite search engine, and type in some of the keywords and phrases we’ve used to see what the results are. You can guarantee that Creative’s many sites will come up – that’s to be expected – it’s their product, after all! But how many others do? (don’t expect to see Practical PC in there – what you’re reading is only available on AOL, and the search engines don’t often come in here – although they do index the pages you create in your AOL webspace). If you do the same sort of thing for your own site, you’ll be able to pick keywords and phrases that not only accurately represent what’s there, and would appeal to your target audience, but also don’t bring up millions of search results. It takes time. It takes patience. It can be frustrating, but the whole process, if carried out properly, should result in you being well up there in the rankings for properly thought out and targeted pages. There’s more, which I’ll cover in another article. Until then, give this strategy a try – you might be favourably surprised!
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