Preparing Your Site for Search Engines
By Peggie Brown (Originally written 2001, updated with editor's notes 2004)
Identify Key Phrases for your site
If you were looking for information similar to the information on your site, how do you search for information and resources on the web? What key phrases and key words would you search? Would you tend to use phrases or words (this depends on the uniqueness of your information and how many potential meanings your key words might invoke.
These are the words and phrases on which you should then concentrate when developing your own meta tags and key words and phrases.
Take the KatsueyDesignWorks site as an example. The services we offer help people by offering professionally designed web sites, provide hosting services, webmaster services and tons of web development information and tutorials. KatsueyDesignWorks also offers e-commerce solutions, marketing, teaching seminars and site content development. How might somebody search for the type of information we offer? They would typically use key phrases such as:
- web site design or web site design
- web site development
- training, education, tutorials
- e-commerce, selling
- webmaster, web hosting
Examine your site and make a list identifying the key words and phrases a potential client might use when searching for the type of information your site carries. After all, if they're looking for certain services and products and you offer then you stand a much better chance of getting the sale because your prospect is pre-qualified. The number of hits on a site doesn't bring in the money unless of course your site is really in the business of selling advertisement.
Name Site Pages Appropriately
Now that you have a list, your next task is to craft appropriate page titles for each page on your site. This is the place where many site designers make a mistake. They either forget to give pages a title or create pages for the visitor, not the search engine. Ensure your page titles contain the most important key words and/or phrases for the specific page and for your site overall.
Create Your Meta Tags
There are two important places where these phrases need to appear. The first place is within the first 250 words of your page. But remember, you need to be clever enough to use the key words and phrases in sentences that also mean something to your visitors. Search Engines frequently only search the first 250 to 400 words of a site to determine site content. The higher your "key phrase density" (the number of times the words are used within the 250 to 400 words read by the search engine without Spamming) the better your ranking in many search engines.
The next place to use your key phrases is in your meta tags. This HTML code helps the search engines, indices and directories properly classified and indexed your page. There are two types of meta tags - those words that describe your site and its key then a key phrase tag describing your site while using as many key words and still making sense. This last phrase is used by many search engines to describe your site to others.
Editor's 2004 note: Meta tags are still somewhat important, especially those that provide a description for your site and give page titles. However Meta keyword descriptions play less and less of a role as dishonest people find ways to manipulate search rankings with these tags. Major search engines tend to disregard keyword meta tags these days.
Submitting Your Site
You've now spent considerable time preparing your site for the search engines and so submitting it to search engines is a cinch. Right? You just run to one of those sites that offers to submit your site to 10 gazillion search engines for a few bucks or for free and that's it. Right? Wrong on both counts!
Actually submitting a site to search engines takes work and anyone who tells you differently is simply wrong. Yes, you can hire someone to do this, but if they do it right, you will pay considerable money on a monthly or quarterly basis. KatsueyDesignWorks submits sites to search engines on a monthly basis for $30 a month (no longer effective). However, we admit it, if you have the time and inclination, there is a better way.
First, we highly recommend two different products which can be used in conjunction with each other (that's the way KatsueyDesignWorks uses the products) or choose one.
The first product is really a service rather than the typical product. Self-Promotion is the least expensive route to go. It's a great service but in our opinion, not the best solution if money is not an issue. Self-Promotion offers fantastic information and tutorials on search engine submission. In addition, once you subscribe, Self-Promotion provides you the actual submission addresses for those search engines and indices that are either required or recommended manual submission. And the best thing about Self-Promotion is the price. You can use many of the services at the site for free. When you decide you appreciate the service, you name the price! That's right, the price is the value you determine based on the information and services you value.
The another great solution is a combination of the HiscSoftware Promotion Suite and Self-Promotion. HiscSoftware Promotion Suite offers TagGen, Hi-Verify and Hi-Visibility to help you generate your meta tags, keywords and titles. The promotion package will assist you by globally placing this data in each web page, then you go to each important page and customized the meta data to fit that specific page. Next, run Hi-Verify and receive tips and information about the suggested meta content and general rules for search engines. Lastly, Hi-Visibility helps you automatically submit to most of the search engines that don't require manual submissions. Many times when submitting a site manually, once the submission takes hold with the search entity, Hi-Visibility is a great tool for later automatic submissions. If you are a FrontPage® user, enjoy the automatic FrontPage® integration so these tools are available right in your web.
Editor's 2004 Note: We told you HISC Software was on top of the search engine submission business! They now offer a tool for making Macromedia Flash sites compatible with Government standards
The HiscSoftware site features unbelievable tools, resources and important theory and information regarding search engines. So even if you are determined not to purchase the software, do drop by and glean from the wealth of resources at this site.
Editor's 2004 Update: We also really like Web CEO This product offers a free version for those only maintaining one site and whose needs are pretty simple and straight forward. You can check your proposed keywords against search engines' statistics showing how many users searched on those keywords or keyword phrases in the last month. Web CEO also analyses your pages for errors, weight and other issues that might cause problems with search engines and/or viewers.
Bottom line, hand submitting sites to each search engine is now the best way to go. Many search engines block automated tools. In addition, the chance of getting your site in the correct regional and topic areas with an automated search submission tool is next to nil.
Research Tool (not available 2004)
While we are recommending products, do also look at Hi-Research from the HiscSoftware folks. We use this wonderful tool to research the Internet for more great sites to add to Katsuey's Legal Gateway and for research information used in our educational presentations. We find it saves incredible amounts of time since is searches with the search engines we specify. We then have all our research on one page. Our only wish list for this particular tool (which we feel certain will be in an upgrade) is that it automatically opened the links in a new window. Right now you can right click and specify to open the links in a new window so that you don't lose your results.
