Directory - e-Strategy - Developing a Good Web Site - Marketing - Content -
Communication - e-Commerce - Search Engines - Community
Spider Bait!
A primary objective of your eStrategy will be to allow your customers and prospects to find you on the Internet. This is not a trivial matter since we have already established that at least 75% of web surfers use search engines immediately upon going online. Our objective in this chapter is to help you develop your web site so your community members can find you when they want you.
Search Optimization Defined
Search optimization is the method used to develop your web site content and computer code to successfully attract search engines and directories to your web site in response to a web user’s search request. It is also aids in improving your ranking, with the ultimate objective of placing your web site at the top of the search results in your particular category.
Search Engines And Directories
There are basically two types of search utilities on the Internet, 1) Search Engines and 2) Directories. Search engines are web sites whose sole purpose is to catalogue other web sites and provide a search function, on a keyword or phrase basis, against their database of information. They use software that is said to ‘spider’ the Internet in search of qualified responses to search requests.
Originally, these search engines captured data on ALL of the web sites on the Internet. However, with the exponential growth of the web, search engines have taken a more targeted approach and now address the cataloguing process on a more regional (US, Germany, etc.), industry or interest basis.
There are thousands of search engines on the Internet. Many of these are specialized engines with a particular interest or industry focus. Of the entire group, only a handful matter to you and your business on the Internet. We will discuss these all-important tools farther on.
Directories are web sites on the Internet that provide collections of sites organized by subject. Visitors click on a topic of interest and then browse through the list of resources in that category, much like using a card catalog in a library.
Directories are constructed and maintained by humans, rather than by the spidering programs used to manage search engines. This human involvement makes directories quite different from search engines.
Although smaller than search engines, directories provide a more focused and organized approach to locating resources because editors have arranged the Internet sites into subject categories. In some cases, the resources have also been rated and reviewed.
Many directories offer results from a search engine when their index does not contain any answers for a particular search. For example, if you perform a search at Yahoo! that does not result in a correct response, Yahoo! will send the request to Google, a search engine, and you will see results from the Google spider on the Yahoo! page.
As with search engines, there are only a handful of directories that really matter to you and your business on the Internet. Of the directories, Yahoo! is the only general directory that receives substantial traffic (approximately 10% of total searches). However, there is another directory that is much more important – the Open Directory Project at http://www.dmoz.org/. Virtually all the search engines (including Google and Yahoo) get at least some of their results from it. The AOL Directory actually gets ALL its results from DMOZ.
Of the search engines, Google is by far the most used (approximately 27% of all searches performed). All others including AOL, MSN, Netscape, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista, Lycos, LookSmart, etc., make up positions well below the leader. Additionally, several of these other search engines are now using a Google search utility to perform their search functions.
Search engines send out crawlers or spiders (hence the name of the article) to scan the contents of your web site and bring the information back to their database. This is an automated process that relies entirely on computers and software.
Web site Design
Successful search optimization requires good web site design. Gone are the days when a web designer could put up a web site and submit search terms to search engines (SEs) and directories to get great results. Today, there’s a lot more to it.
Site Map
Creating a sitemap, which is a list of links to every page in your web site, is a great way to ensure that the spiders will find your site and will crawl each page. Having done so they will retreat from your site with a full list of all of the information from your web site.
Links
Every search engine is different in the way that they rank relevancy for search results purposes. Google, the largest volume SE, applies a weighting factor based on the number of links into your site from other relevant sites in their index. It is important therefore that you establish some links of your own. Go out and do a search on some of the terms that you expect your prospects and customers will use to find you. What web sites comprise the top results pages? Will they trade links with you? If so, you will both improve your search results ranking.
Metadata and Tags
Metatags are terms in the HTML (hyper text markup language) source code that are used to describe the contents of the website. The meta keyword tag used to be the big deal in getting your website ranked. Not so any more. Now, the meta description tag, used by many engines to build your display listing in their results, is much more important. But more important than any meta tag are the title tag, and the key words and phrases you use in your page content.
Title
Your title tag, which is the “name” of your particular webpage, is very important (especially to Google). It should be brief, 60 characters or less, and it should match both the contents of the page and the terms and phrases people will use to find your page.
Keywords and Phrases
Your keywords are words that you use to describe the contents of your webpage. These can also be names or phrases, according to the contents of the page. It is important to focus on the words that people are using in your category. If you are using obscure words or phrases, you aren’t likely to be found very often.
Page Description
Your page description, or meta description tag, is where you provide a brief narrative description of your webpage. This is the information that many engines and directories will use as their description of your webpage in the search results. It is important to keep your description concise and focused for this reason. This is especially important for a Yahoo! listing. The people who manage the Yahoo! database will review your description carefully, and if they do not agree with your terms, they will write their own, which may or may not be to your advantage.
Webpage Content
Making sure that your webpage content contains all of your keyword phrases is a critical step in successful search optimization. In the past, it was possible to get the attention of the engines and a high ranking by inserting a long string of keywords into a webpage. This practice is commonly referred to as stuffing or spamdexing, and no longer works. Today search engines have become very sophisticated and can quickly “sniff-out” attempts to fool them, including page redirection, cloaking and many other techniques heavily promoted by unscrupulous search engine optimization firms.