Success with Search Engines: Introduction
© 2004
by Malcolm Cooper
at http://www.cotswoldwebdesign.com
Background
It’s a search engine’s clear
and simple mission to deliver the most relevant
results to their users. To that extent search
engines are your friends. If you own a site
that is unique and delivers the very best information
on your chosen subject your site will be number
one in every search engine for your chosen subject?
Well, that’s the theory but of course it isn’t
as simple as that.
In the real world it’s unlikely
that your site will be quite that unique unless
of course it’s title is “The Microbiological
Properties of Yaks Milk”. Incidentally, at the
time of writing a search on that phrase in Google.com
returns 34 results !
Let’s assume you are the world
expert on Yaks Milk and that the content of
your site is technically superior to any other
Yaks Milk site in the world. When your site
is uploaded to a server you might expect to
rank high in that same Google search within
a few weeks. That’s a reasonable assumption
but it doesn’t work quite in that way.
How Does it Work?
Search engines send out robot
spiders around the internet to index web pages.
These spiders do not make reasoned judgements
in any human sense. They work against a programmed
algorithm. Simply a set of rules. A spider is
basically “stupid”. It doesn’t rank sites on
the basis of your taste in colors, your use
of grammar or your choice of graphics. It “eats”
content and content is text. Text is “spider
food” and the spider needs to be shown where
its food is. This is the role of header tags,
structure and navigation. The spider needs to
be able to get around your entire site content
easily. If you are going to design your own
site you need to know how this works. If you
are going to commission a professional designer
you need to know that THEY know how this works.
When you have a site about
the microbiological properties of Yaks milk
with the best content on that subject available
on the internet and excellent meta tags, site
structure and navigation you are a contender.
Now you stand a fighting chance of climbing
the search engine ranks. The most forgotten
(or ignored) aspect of this thing known as “search
engine optimisation” is time. It can take a
number of months to get any significant position
on the major search engines. The spiders have
to crawl billions of web pages and re-indexing
occurs in periodic bursts so a key factor in
search engine optimisation is PATIENCE.
Search engines are always
seeking to improve their results. Rules (algorithms)
change. If you’re serious about search engine
optimisation you must ensure that you keep up
to date with the latest developments or ensure
that you work with a web design professional
who does.
How to Plan for Success
You now know that content
is king. Many people start to create a website
by opening a web editor and preparing their
first page. Ask yourself how you are going to
set up your page(s) before you have prepared
your content. To be successful with search engines
you need to know what your content is going
to be before you start preparing web pages.
The content is the spider food and you are going
to lead the spiders around your site. You’ll
do this by optimised page titles, page descriptions
and other “tags” placed in the header of each
page and by putting in place a sound navigation
system. You can’t do this effectively until
you know both the text and graphical content
for each page of your site. So there is your
starting point. Prepare your text and graphics
page by page, off line, before embarking upon
web design.
This is just the beginning
of designing a site for Success with Search
Engines.
This article may be freely republished
as long as the article, including the header and
footer information, is republished in its entirety,
unedited, and with all links working.
Article number 1 out of 1 in
the series "Success with Search Engines".
