Search
Engines are probably the single most important element after building
your website, and certainly the most difficult to understand. This
will be a brief explanation of what they do and how they do it and
how you can get your site into the top positions.
There
are about 10 major search engines which account for about 98% of all
searches on the Internet. Of these 10, Yahoo is possibly the best
known and the most difficult to get your site registered with. Each
search engine has it's own criteria for ranking sites when keywords
are entered into a search. These criteria include your keywords, and
how many times they are repeated. Generally, the more the better,
BUT if keywords are repeated too often, they will not list your site
at all as punishment for spamming. They have criteria for the number
of keywords in the text of your page, in the alt text, which is the
text that pops up before an image has finished loading, in the heading
text, (words or phrases can be tagged as heading 1,2,3,etc.), in your
meta tags, (invisible text in the HTML coding of your webpage). Some
search engines run case sensitive searches, some do not, and some
favor a certain number of words on a page, a certain number of pages
in a site, and a certain number of other sites that are linked to
yours. Obviously since the criteria for each search engine is different
and changes from time to time, this is quite maddening, though not
impossible to deal with.
Some
of the search engines actually "spider" (move through your
site page by page, link by link until the whole site is indexed) your
website, while others, notably Yahoo, are actually a database of what
they choose to index. Yahoo is indexed entirely by human beings, which
means someone actually looks at your site to see if it meets their
standards and then indexes your site or not. If not, you may never
know why. Yahoo will register a site within anywhere from 4 days to
6 months time. Yahoo also must be submitted to completely by hand
and very carefully. Search engines in general take 2 weeks to 3 months
to index your site once it's submitted, and very often repeat submissions
are necessary, although submitting too often may also be penalized
by removing your site from the index.
Search
Engine Optimization
What
is search engine optimization? It is a process that improves the positions
your website comes up in, when a search is done using specific keywords.
So,
exactly what is done to optimize a website for search engines? For
starters some very thorough research. Multiple searches need to be
done using keywords (and key "phrases") that you think most
people would use to find a website like yours. Key phrases are actually
far more effective, as single keywords tend to bring up hundreds of
thousands of results, and the top 10-30 are the only ones that matter.
Searches are done to determine which key phrases bring up the most
relevant sites. The next stage is analyzing the websites that come
up in the top 10 for each search engine. The top sites will be analyzed
for all of the criteria mentioned above so that as many of those parameters
as possible can be incorporated into the structure of your webpages.
Obviously
since there are different requirements for each search engine one
page can't contain all the best elements for all the search engines.
The webpage content and structure can be kind of generalized to try
to please as many engines as possible, or you can create "specialized"
pages. Specialized pages are individual pages designed to target specific
search engines with specific keywords, and bring visitors to specific
areas of your website. This means you might have different meta tags,
keyword content and page titles on various pages, each specifically
targeted to bring your site up on different search engines. By now
you probably have some idea why optimizing your website for the search
engines is a complex and demanding task that is as important as the
site itself.
Search
Engine Optimization Costs
A
basic, well planned search engine submission will cost about $100,
and a good optimization program will cost from $50-$500 a month for
a specified period of time, usually 4-6 months. This is a service
that Website Designerz is qualified and happy to offer you. There are no
magic bullets to bring your site into number one positions, but there
are effective solutions to greatly improve your positions and increase
traffic to your site.
Search
engines can be the most important element in bringing visitors to
your website, but it takes time, monitoring, and deserves whatever
amount of investment you can reasonably budget for this purpose. There
are multitudes of companies that will offer you search engine submission
to up to 1500 search engines for anything from free to $35 to $100.
In most cases like these you may as well burn your money. A basic,
intelligent submission will bring you some of the results you seek,
and a reasonable investment in an aggressive program of search engine
optimization can bring dramatic results.
Submission
to search engines needing re-registration. (those search engines
where your site is not coming up in the first 30, or not coming
up at all)
$10/mo.
Level
2
Same
as above plus optimizing meta-tags. (keyword content and description
tags)
$50/mo.
Level
3
Same
as above plus optimizing webpage search engine content. (keyword
content within text, heading tags, alt tags, link tags)
$100/mo.
Level
4 Customized program of search engine optimization
Intensive
optimization of all content on all pages to improve search engine
position. This includes "specialized" pages of your
website for specific search engines and analysis of all text,
alt text, link text targeting each of the major search engines.
