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By James Boyle
Search engines play an integral part in driving traffic to your website. With billions of web pages now making up the Internet, appearing on the first few pages of search results is one of the most important ways to get your website found. This article examines which search engines are important to Australian Internet users, how they work, and details some simple things you can do to help your website rank well for the keywords you have chosen.
Which Search Engines are important?
Although there are a large number of search engines across the Internet, only a few are really worth worrying about. The top four search engines by market share in Australia are Google, Yahoo!, NineMSN and Sensis. As well as serving the lion’s share of searches in Australia, they also provide their results to other well known locations (for example, OptusNet search uses Yahoo!’s search results).
How do Search Engines Work?
In simplest terms, search engines work by using automatic programs called ‘spiders’ or ‘bots’ to crawl the web and look at each and every web page that they comes across (Google at the moment claims to look at over 8 billion web pages). The pages are then ranked in importance for different combinations of keywords. When you use a search engine to look for pages relating to particular keywords, the search engine will return you the relevant pages in the order that it has ranked them.
The way that each search engine ranks pages is a closely guarded secret and is constantly being changed and refined. Therefore the ranking of your page can never be guaranteed, and you will always be fighting with your competitors to achieve that top spot.
Search engines find out about new sites in two ways. Firstly they can come across them because another page that it has already ranked links to your site. Secondly, most search engines have a page where you can let them know about your new website. The engines then add this to their list of web pages to look at and in due course your website will be examined and added to their results. The time between registering a new site and appearing in search results can be up to a few months and unfortunately you just have to be patient.
How do I get a good ranking in Google (and other search engines)?
This is literally the million dollar question, and an entire industry called Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has been built out of trying to achieve good search engine results for your website. If you are really concerned about getting a top 3 spot for a popular search term in a search engine such as Google then it may be worth engaging their services, but be prepared to have your chequebook open. Also remember that search engine results are a moving target. While you are changing your website so as to appear at number one on the search engines, the engines are changing their ranking algorithm to ensure that their results are as unbiased and accurate as possible.
For the rest of us without thousands of dollars to spend on optimising our website, there are some basic principles we use that have been shown to consistently help your ranking on each of the four main search engines.
1 - Determine the keywords you want to optimise for.
You must first decide the search terms you want to rank highly for in order to target your site effectively. In determining the words and phrases that you want to focus on there are a number of things you can do
- Type in candidate search terms in a search engine and see what sites come up for those words.
- Having a number of precise phrases is better than a single vague word, for example ‘melbourne website designer’ is a better keyword to target than just ‘websites’.
- Pick variations of search terms – use a keywords suggestion tool or ask your friendly web designer.
- Look at your competitors’ websites and note the words and phrases that are used.
2 - Unless you have specific content, focus on your home page
Your home page is the entry point to your website and is therefore the page that you should focus on when optimising for search engines. If you have specific content that you want people to find feel free to optimise those pages individually but your home page is where you want to receive most traffic. Having one page to optimise rather than your whole site also makes the task seem that much more manageable.
3 - Make sure that your keywords appear frequently in text on your home page
The more your keywords appear on your page the more relevant a search engine will think you are. This is true up to a point, but you should never lose sight of the fact that your website is ultimately for the user, and so should as a first priority be readable, relevant and informative to real people visiting your site. A website that has your keywords as every second sentence may convince Google that you are important (though maybe not, see about fooling the search engines further on), but anyone who actually visits your site will go somewhere else pretty quickly. Use your keywords liberally but without detracting from your page as a whole. Also remember search engines cannot read text when it is on an image.
4 - Use the description with your images
Web pages allow you to attach a short piece of text to each image you have on your site (this is know as the <ALT> tag). Incorporating your keywords in these one or two words has been shown to help search engines associate your site with those keywords. Also, as search engines cannot interpret the content of images, this description is the only way of letting them know what your image is about.
5 - Put your keywords in the title of your page.
The title of your page is what appears at the top of your web browser (such as Internet Explorer) when you have your website open. Typically this is given a lot of weight by search engines so putting a good single sentence containing your keywords yields good results. It is also the single line that most search engines display when your site is listed in a search engine’s results page.
6 - Place a short sentence at the top of your page with your keywords in it.
This should only be done if it makes sense on your home page (remember, focus on the user first, then the search engine). Often the sentence you used in your title can be used to good effect both for the user and the search engine.
7 - Include a Meta Description and Keywords.
These are words that are contained in your website but are not visible to users. Most people believe that search engines give these little weight but it doesn’t hurt to put them in. Additionally search engines often use Meta tags to describe your site in their results.
8 - Get good quality links to your site
Search engines do not just look at the content of your site, but also how other pages on the web link to you. This is why you cannot explain a site’s ranking in a search engine by looking at the page in isolation. Google in particular puts a value on having high quality pages linking to you. The best way to obtain these links is to offer reciprocal links to other sites. A quick, polite email to a site owner once your site is up and running asking to exchange links will usually be received well. Make sure you pick sites that are relevant and complement your site. Suppliers, customers or trade-related sites are often the best. Resist blindly signing up for sites that just have pages and pages of links. These ‘link farms’ are often frowned upon by the search engines and may even hurt your ranking rather than helping it.
Once you get an agreement from someone to put in a link to your site, see if you can chose the text that accompanies the link. A link to your site that contains your keywords will be a lot more valuable than a link with just the URL of your site.
Is there anything I should not do?
1 - Do not try and fool the search engines.
Search engines are always trying to give the most relevant results to Internet users, and so over the years they have become wise to most of the tricks used to fool them into believing your site is not what it is. Things like having your keywords in white text on a white background, or filling the bottom of your page with your keyword 100 times will be ignored by most search engines. Some may even blacklist your site for trying things like this, and getting back in their good books is often difficult.
2 - Do not pay for submission to “thousands of search engines”
You may have seen the advertisements claiming to be able to submit you to thousands of search engines. Even though there are a lot more search engines out there than the four we named earlier, these four will cover almost all of the searches done in Australia. Since most of the smaller ones use the results of the major search engines, your site will soon be visible by most search engines Internet wide without the “help” of these submission services.
About
the author
James Boyle
Elemental Services http://www.elementalservices.com.au/
July 2005
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We also specialize in search engine submission and optimization as well as tools and resources useful for better ranking / positioning in search engines.
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