A Few Words on Search Engines

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A Few Words on Search Engines

I thought I would post a few words on search engines because my ‘spidey’ senses are tingling and indicating a bit of confusion on the search-engine-optimizing (SEO) subject.

Trying to keep it brief, these are some guidelines that work with today’s search algorithms and the logic behind them. I’m going to mainly talk about Google, Yahoo and MSN because for most people, they are the only ones that really matter and the others will catch up along the way anyway.

* I won’t cover tricks and ways to spam search engines because (believe me) trying to trick search engines will eventually backfire and bite you in the rear costing you endless hours of resubmitting and re-evaluating your website.

Submit to Search Engines
Submit your site to search engines. Most have free submissions and it only has to be done once. If you never submit your site some search engines will eventually index it, but it’s a good idea to take matters into your own hands and give it a head start.

Google
Add your site to Google
http://www.google.com/addurl.html
Add your site to Google UK
http://www.google.co.uk/addurl.html
Google Information for Webmasters
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

MSN (Inktomi Search Index that powers MSN search)
http://submitit.bcentral.com/msnsubmit.htm
Scrub The Web
http://www.scrubtheweb.com/addurl.html
Yahoo! directory
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/suggest/
Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
http://dmoz.org/add.html
Yahoo! search (new) - Yahoo! Registration required.
https://login.yahoo.com/config/logi...om/free/request

Trafficology.com - http://www.trafficology.com/submitlinks.html
isitebuild.com - http://www.isitebuild.com/major-search-engines.htm
FreeLinks.com - http://www.freelinks.com/

* If your site is new, wait 6 to 8 weeks before declaring that all of this search engine stuff is a load of nonsense. It seriously takes that long before a noticeable difference will be shown. (On my honor this is the way it works!) Once you’re well indexed you may be updated every day.

Where Do You Rank?
Where does your site rank with the millions of others? You need to know if you’re going to make improvements. Check where you rank on Google. This is fun and easy now with the free tool from CleverStat.com

Get the tool here: http://www.cleverstat.com/google-monitor-query.htm

Get robots.txt (for all search engines)
Search engines run programs called bots or spiders that enter a website and log text information and look for links to follow. The first thing they look for is a file called robots.txt.

You need this file in the root directory of your website!

With this file you can direct spiders to where you want them to go and not go. You can deny entry for some spiders and allow others access. Make it easy on search engine spiders and get robots.txt.

A simple listing for robots:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /_private/
Disallow: /_vti_cnf/
Disallow: /_vti_log/
Disallow: /_vti_pvt/
Disallow: /_vti_script/
Disallow: /_vti_txt/

Learn more about robots.txt: http://www.searchengineworld.com/ro...ts_tutorial.htm

Meta Tags
The debate about Meta Tags rages on. Some search engines no longer pay attention to them so the “bleeding edge small page size is best” developers are saying leave them out.

I say put them in and if you do, make them useful.

I typically use 8 tags:
(The first one removes the silly image toolbar from IE)

<meta http-equiv="imagetoolbar" content="no" />
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta name="Description" content="short description here" />
<meta name="Keywords" content="5 to 7 keywords comma separated" />
<meta name="keyphrases" content="3 to 5 phrases comma separated" />
<meta name="Revisit-After" content="10 Days" />
<meta name="Distribution" content="Global" />
<meta name="Robots" content="index,follow" />

Page Title
One of the most important elements on your webpage is the title. Make sure it is loaded but not overloaded with keyword rich text synchronized with your page content. Furthermore, make sure every page has a distinct title that describes the content of the page. This could be the number one best tip for improving your “SERPs” Search Engine Result Pages.

Page Text & hyperlinks
Search engines love text so make it count. Search engines can’t see images and don’t care about colours. They aren’t too fond of images of text, JavaScript, Flash or DHTML so the best way to improve site indexing (when a search engine follows and catalogues all of the pages of your site) is to pull out your fancy rollover JavaScript menu and install a new one that uses hypertext and CSS.

Learn CSS! You can achieve the same fancy rollover effects with smaller pages and the search engines will see the text and follow the links. As an added step, install a site map with hyperlinks to all pages and have it linked to your main navigation. That’s a sure fire way to get indexed.

The example code below is for a search engine friendly menu. It is a CSS powered menu with three states for on, off and hover.

Note - This requires a correctly designed and formatted CSS stylesheet to make it work properly a working example of this type of menu can be found at www.bctsvp.com:

<div id="navPosition">
<a href="download.html" title="Download">DOWNLOAD</a>
<a href="index.html" title="Return to Home">HOME</a>
<a href="preview.html" title="Preview available">PREVIEW</a>
<a href="money.html" title="Payment Options">PAYMENT</a>
<a href="rules.html" title="Terms and Conditions">TERMS</a>
<a href="faq.html" title="Frequently Asked Questions">FAQ</a>
</div>

Add title attributes to all images and hyperlinks. They provide yet another piece of the puzzle for the search engine to improve your ranks. The example above uses the title attribute for each link.

Backward links
After a search engine has all this good information about your site it needs to figure out where to rank it in the other hundreds of millions of websites cataloged. One piece of important information is the amount of links that go to your site from other relevant sites. If you have a site that concentrates on 1950 Ford Convertibles, you would do well to have other sites about this subject linking to your site. This is another important piece of the puzzle.

Check your backward links on top search engines here: http://www.uptimebot.com/

Webmaster Tools
Learn the Webmaster commands at Yahoo, Google and other search engines. There are a number of handy tools at your disposal over at the big search engines. For instance in the search field at Google type in allinurl:Your_Domain_Name (ie: allinurl:lunadesign.org)

This tells you how many pages Google has indexed, linking to your domain. I receive about 385 returns of links that go to pages on my website. Do it with your competition and see how many links they have inbound to their site. It tells a pretty interesting story.

Try link:www.Your_Domain_Name

More on commands here: http://www.google.ca/help/operators.html

Update Your Content
Search Engines like to see change and the way they rate pages changes as well. Change your content regularly. If you are well placed, search engines will index your site on a daily basis but you can’t rest on your laurels yet. You need to work at keeping that top spot. Search engine will rank a site with changing content higher than a site with static unchanging content. Add a current events section to the index page of your site and keep it current and relevant to your site’s subject.

Search engines have changed the way they rate pages and gone are the days of simply repeating keywords throughout the page (spamming) and loading up Meta tags (more spamming). Search engines look for synonyms (synchronous to the subject in the title tags and keywords) as well as grammar when ranking sites. This reduces the chances for tricked out cheater websites and improves the chances for real honest to goodness websites with relevant content.

Good luck and I’ll come back and update this when things change as I’m sure they will.

Cheers,
Andrew