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Solving the Mystery of Search Engines and
Rankings
Part Two: Site Content
Q:
Last year I spent thousands of dollars for a new Web site, but it never seems
to show up in a search engine! How will people find my company if the search
engines refuse to cooperate?. . . . .
. . . . . . .
A. As we learned prevously, search engines are a fickle lot. Just when we think we know how to update Web sites to make them place higher in search results, the rules get changed! Efforts to make the constant adjustments needed to continually rank highest in search engines are akin to nailing jello to a tree. You can pay someone a lot of money to keep your Web site at the top, or you can stick to the basics described here.
Let's focus on how to adjust the content of your site to increase your chances of being identified by someone searching for the products or services you provide.
The most important point to remember is that the search engine computers that crawl through your site for information, can read only one thing: text. Further, they read only text that is created by a keyboard – not text that is created in a graphics program. That means that no matter what components are used to develop your site – words, photos, logos, drawings or databases – they must be represented in some way by using text.
How can you tell which parts are text vs. a photo or a graphic? Obviously a photo is a photo. But a graphic created from words isn’t the same as text. The easiest way to tell the difference is to roll your mouse over them. If the mouse becomes a cursor, and you can highlight the words, then they are pure text. If your mouse pointer becomes an arrow, then you are pointing to a blank space, or to a graphic. The third type of mouse pointer you might see on a page is a hyperlink, which often becomes a “finger” pointer.
Your goal, then, is to make your page as text-rich as it can be, which means you’ll need to be sure that even the photos and graphics are also represented by text.
Writing the Words
Just as we reviewed how to produce good keywords for your metatags, we need to do the same for your content. Make sure the text is based on keywords you know people will use to find you in a search engines. Please don’t include too much text making it difficult to read. Just make sure that what you use is succinctly representative of what that page is about.
Presenting logos, photos and other graphics
Using logos, photos and other graphics on your site will make your Web pages more interesting, and often more instructional to your site visitors. But how can you use them without getting in the way of the need for text for search engines?
All site graphics should be assigned an “alt tag”, an alternative representation for that graphic. You can see whether your designer has used alt tags by rolling your mouse over a graphic, then pausing for a second. If words pop up from your mouse, and those words describe the graphic, then yes, your site was developed with alt tags. If they are missing, then check with your designer. They are not difficult to add to a site.
A warning about databases
If your Web site utilizes a database to manage its content, then be warned: Search engines have difficulty reading the information in a database. If your site offers a search capability for products or other components, and that search is served by a database, then look to see if the Web address of your search results contains a question mark in the middle. If so, then it is likely search engines are not indexing your site properly and may be missing your products or information completely. Ask your Web developer about providing alternative static pages, or rewriting the code to exclude question marks.
We still haven’t covered search engine optimization basics completely. Next month we’ll cover ways to make your site an “authority", and how to tell search engines your site exists.
(Link to Part III: Titles, Link and Submitting Your Site)
Trisha Torrey, owner of IntegriMark Communications and author of http://411, has been helping businesses score on the Web since the mid-1990s. From large corporations, to non-profit organizations, to individual entrepreneurs, her advice, planning and development services have helped raise the Web marketing bar while keeping a keen eye on the bottom line.
Email questions to her at: questions@http-411.com .
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