Getting Listed on Search Engines

All too often, I’m asked, “What can I do to get the best possible listing for my site?” This is usually right along side “what is this part of the Page Advisor report trying to tell me?” and “Why am I not listed?” While each situation is different and the questions continue to vary from case to case, the answers have some very common threads. These are not the final word on optimization, but will get you into a position to really consider the fine-tuning aspects that Page Advisor will provide for you. (We can discuss Page Advisor another time…)

The first step here is to come up with, perhaps, a dozen key-phrases. These are multi-word keywords that are focused on the expected search phrases used by your customers. You can figure these out, ask existing customers, study search phrases from those engines that display these. There are a number of ways to determine these, and after a little time, SiteStats can provide these phrases to you and you will see what phrases are not working as well.

Use these key-phrases in your keywords tag, but if that is all you do with them, don’t bother thinking about them in the first place. The meta tags everyone gets so exited about are not magic by any means and are only rarely considered for positioning or indexing. There are, however, some very valid reasons to maintain them. Analysis programs like Page Advisor will read them and provide you with poor results if they are not found. You can reference them for the rest of your page, as you will soon see. Finally, while most engines will ignore them, some will actually read them and if they find them relevant, use them.

Ok, we have a dozen, or so, key-phrases. What do we do with them? Where do they go? The first place is the title of the page. No, we don’t want to put all of them there. The last thing you want to do is create word lists anywhere but the meta-keywords tag. The Title should be about 8 words long and contain your primary and possibly your secondary key-phrases. Make the title relevant, understandable and compelling. Consider that this is the first thing someone is going to see in reference to your site. Do you think people will be more attracted to a list of products or a quick sentence stating what they will find on your site? The answer is fairly obvious, isn’t it?

Imagine this as a Billboard for your site. At a glance, what do you want your customers to know about you? A good copywriter will tell you that the purpose of the first line is to get you, the reader, to want to read the second line. The purpose of the second line is to get you to the third line. If your potential customer is not compelled to read further into your site, you could be listed number one on every engine for every keyword and would not get the traffic that such a position should get you. You would single handedly cause the number two spot to be coveted by the world.

Ok, we have a title. We need some content for the customers and spiders to read. While there are legitimate places to insert readable content, don’t count on them. Alt tags, Comments, Meta Tags, and a host of other title and name parameters for various tags (I cannot teach them all to you here. Please look them up at www.w3c.org) These can be used at need and are quite useful. The point here, however, is to express the need and value of readable text based content. You know, paragraphs that people can understand and see.

When a spider visits a site, it filters out much of the extraneous “garbage” it finds on the page. Tags are stripped out, leaving references to URLs, image file names and raw text. They can only file away the URLs for future reference. They can only provide the image name. They can read the raw text that is found. This text will provide them with the information they will use to index your site. Finding the phrases you are promoting will just be natural for them if you are promoting the phrases within your content.

The links they find are placed in a queue to be spidered at a later date or by another spider. These sites, if new ones are found, get spidered with a higher priority than any of the other links they have for spidering. If the engine is already aware of the site, it adds to their Link Popularity. No matter how you slice it, links to your site are the best means of getting a good listing. Summing it all up, good content with good links will get you listed well.

Jon Peterson
Cyberspace HQ