The web is an amazing place to find information when you need it. All a person needs to do in order to find what they are looking for is visit a major search engine and type in a search phrase. I like to think of the Internet as a gigantic electronic library with several ugly books, and some very nice looking books with plenty to offer the reader. Is your site listed on the major search engines? Statistics today show that more than 80% of website traffic is generated from search engines. People don’t know that you even exist and are hoping to find someone that does with the answers to their needs online. If you are not listed with search engines, you can consider your site lost in the giant Web parking lot that so many other sites are sitting on.

The most important thing for someone to do once they have added their site to the Internet is to promote it. The best way to do this is with search engines! Unfortunately, most designers and developers have no clue how to accomplish this sometimes mundane task of being optimized for these monstrosities of information. Let alone the fact that the techniques which keep you positioned within a decent rank on these sites is continually changing. Is your site optimized to be listed?

There are many things to cover in order to make your site meet the specs for these important indexes and directories. One of the most important things to grasp is what a search engine is looking at when it is deciding where to index your site. There are some basic things that the majority of them look at. However, keep in mind these things do change on occasion in the race to keep technology up to speed. First of all, a search engine uses a program called either a spider or a bot. These little creatures visit your site once you have submitted your information to that particular engine. They don’t see all of the beautiful and flashy graphics on the page, nor do they even care about them. They are after one thing, and one thing only; content!

Spiders/bots actually look through the code of your website to find all of this content. Some of these bots start with your header information. The header includes things like the title, and Meta tags. The title is first of all being the title for that page, and what the page is all about. The Meta tags are the description of your page and the particular search terms/keywords that are contained within in your page, and hope to be found in the search engine. If the title of your site does not contain any of the keywords you want to be found under, that is a big mark against you; especially since the title will show up on the search engines and directories, helping the browser decide whether to click on your link or the next one.

Next you have the Meta tags (Your keywords and description submitted to the engines). The information in these tags should correlate with the text in the body of your website. If they don’t, you have another major and very important mark against you (Keyword relevance)! You want to use keywords that show up in the information you are offering your readers. Why would someone do a search on an engine for computers, find your page, and then read all about clothing? This is why you need to make your keywords work along with the content that you are offering.

Some things of importance are the words that you choose to use. How many other sites are using those same keywords? Is it 100,000 or is it 800? Well, obviously if it is only 800, the term is not nearly as popular, but you have a chance of being found on that listing. There are sites out there dedicated to giving research information about what the most popular terms are that are being searched for. Also any major SEO professional will be able to offer you this information for a fee.

Another thing to consider is whether or not you are using a particular keyword too much in your page. If you are, it could be considered spamming to the search engine you’re submitting to. Doing this will only get you blacklisted from their engine. Once you have become blacklisted on an engine, you have no hope of showing up. BE CAREFUL NOT TO SPAM!

The use of the header tag inside of the page body (Which is basically a text headline is something you should always try to use). It should be common sense to think of your website like a newspaper. When you look at the front page of a newspaper, the most crucial and important stories are located at the top of the page. These are what grab your attention to let you know the title of the news. They can work hand in hand with your title tags that are listed inside of the header information of your page's code.

You should also understand what code will look like to a search engine spider/bot. Does it have to sort through tons of code in order to find any content? If it does you are not going to get the best rating from this engine. However if the first thing after the main body tag is a header tag, then you’ll be receiving some better ratings from that spider/bot.

You might think to yourself, "How can I make my site appear visually appealing and still have information available right after or close to the body tag?" This is where technologies like CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) come into play. With CSS you can arrange your text content in your code to show in a different order than it displays on the screen.

This is just a little bit of information to help point you into the right direction, but remember, without knowledge you are shooting in the dark. Do not set yourself up to fail because you did not do your research. Better yet, hire a web development firm that offers this service, or a firm that specializes in SEO only.

Lonnie L. Leddy – CEO – Black Widow Technologies