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It's
all about location, location, location
By
Mark Femal
IHave
you ever searched unsuccessfully on the Internet for information
you knew existed but may have forgotten to bookmark? Many
times you might be able to guess the correct address using
your browser, but often, you rely on your favorite search
engine to find what you seek.
Depending on your search terms and skill of mastering special
syntax, you may be frustrated to find 10 search results
or 10,000, neither yielding what you originally sought.
You may wonder how search engines work and whether visitors
to your Web site encounter the same frustration of not being
able to find your site.
Building a successful online presence takes a committed
strategy for integrating your Web site into your existing
marketing practices. As part of the planned implementation
and ongoing maintenance of your Web site, it is critical
you consider the necessary steps to ensure your Web site
address is listed correctly with various search engines.
Web sites should be considered an extension to any existing
delivery system employed to reach your customers. Without
adequately promoting your Web presence through appropriate
channels, all the hard work and money building your site
is for naught.
There are two ways to promote your Web site: offline and
online. With offline marketing, you use more traditional
avenues of marketing including billboards, radio, television,
and printed materials such as letterhead and business cards.
Online marketing focuses on banner advertising, email, and
search engines. Of these, search engines are the most popular
means of locating information. A study last month by NPD
Group, a marketing intelligence firm, stated 55 percent
of online purchases were found through search listings while
only 9 percent were found through banner ads.
Even though a majority of Internet users rely on search
engines to locate sites, many don't go past the first three
to four pages of search results. Increasing your ranking
in those first few pages of results guarantees increased
exposure for your Web presence. In order to do this, your
Web site must be optimized appropriately for search engines.
The traditional definition of a search engine you may already
be familiar with can be further refined to include "crawler"
based services as well as directories. Web site crawlers
are autonomous programs that examine your web site content
and index it. Crawlers can only perform this activity when
they are notified appropriately that your Web site exists.
One such popular service that functions in this manner is
Google.
When a crawler examines your site, it takes a look at your
"meta" and "alt" tags along with the title and content of
your site. Meta tags are embedded code that cannot normally
be seen in your browser but are used by the crawler to help
it understand and classify your information. Alt tags provide
additional information about the images within your Web
site, but are sometimes used by search engines to further
dissect your pages. The title of your page is displayed
in the top bar in your browser and is especially important
due to its usage when creating bookmarks. If interested,
you can use the "View Source" option in your browser on
an Internet page and look for these tags. The following
are a few examples:
Title:
<TITLE>Beantree - Internet, E-commerce, programming,
web design, based in Appleton, Wisconsin and serving the
Midwest.</TITLE>
Meta Tags:
<META name="keywords" content="Internet, E-commerce,
web development, site design, Wisconsin, Green Bay, Appleton,
web hosting, programming, catalog, internet development,
IPIX">
<META
name="description" content="Beantree develops custom Internet
applications including secure e-commerce catalogs, message
boards, shopping carts and more. We can help you reach your
goals on the Internet!">
Alt Tag:
<img src="/images/littlecockpit.jpg" ALT="Client Cockpit"
border="0">
Search directories are a little different from crawler-based
services. Submitters themselves control some directories,
such as theOpen Directory; while others classify your Web
site by having someone review it and appropriately categorize
it, like Yahoo. Submitting your Web site to directories
is a little more time consuming.
Rather than letting the search engine classify your content
automatically, a directory requires more intervention either
on your part or with the directory maintainers to appropriately
categorize your site either by region or nature of business.
Now that you know a little about search engines, how do
you improve your ranking? Understanding what search engines
look for is the first step to improving your placement.
Make the best use of your meta tags, text within your page,
alt tags, and page title. Another key to improving your
placement is to ensure to resubmit your Web site to crawler-based
search engines every month.
These search engines try to keep up-to-date content, so
resubmission works to re-index your content when changes
occur as well as preventing your site from being dropped
due to technical reasons. Keep in mind that repeatedly submitting
your Web site in a small time frame is not considered good
practice and it may get you banned. With search directories
the strategy is simply to ensure your site is available
in all applicable categories based on where you do business
and the products and services you offer.
Fee-based services exist which will submit your Web site
to search engines for you. In addition, some hosting companies
provide services for doing reoccurring submission so check
with your hosting provider. It is important to realize it
is never too late to implement measures to improve your
placement. Just remember, a little extra work upfront will
leave fewer frustrations behind.
Mark Femal is Lead Technical Analyst for Beantree, Inc.
in Appleton with more than 6 years of Internet development
experience. He graduated with a Computer Science degree
from the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. He can be reached
at [email protected].
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