Search Engines:

Search Engine users are prospective clients who do not know you yet. They want to do business and are trying to find you. Most users select sites from the first page of results. If your ranking is low, these customers will never find your site.

It is good business sense to help these Engines propose your web site to potential clients.

Google:

• Google is the most-used search engine.
• Google also provides the information for other engines, including AOL, Excite, Ask, Lycos, HotBot, Netscape, Teoma...
• Conclusion: Potential customers are most likely using Google.
• The higher your ranking in Google's results, the greater your chance of being visited.
• Do you look on page 12 for a site to visit, or do you choose from page 1 and sometimes page 2?

To help Google rank your site properly, your site must be "googlefriendly", defined by Google as :-

"Design & Usability + Web Site Navigation + Page Content + Keyword Research"

We will show you how these factors have a major impact on how a website is ranked in Google - and this applies to other major Search Engines. But first, a quick word on how Engines identify the key features of your web site in order to categorise and index it.

Robots:

Search engine programmes, called "robots", roam the web, discovering and categorising sites. The robots examine the source code of your site, not just the attractive pages seen by the visitor. Their reports help determine the fate of your on-line business.

Design & Usability:

Professional design includes googlefriendliness.

No matter how visually attractive your site to a human visitor who reaches it, this will not impress a robot trying to categorise and index your site. Graphical design is no longer enough - your site must also be designed with robots in mind.

Missed opportunities :-

Robots do not read the text included in an image or a Flash animation
If your slogan is included in a graphic it is invisible to a robot. Likewise, robots ignore the content of your company profile so expensively displayed in an online movie. Attractive visuals enhance a site to a human visitor, but extra work is needed to please the robots.

Robots are not comfortable with frames
They are a useful tool for human navigation, but robots tend to read the frameset information - which only tells the browser which pages represent the header and the main content page. As Google says, robots are "impatient" and can fail to record important content.

Most web site designers concentrate on visuals for humans, which ignore or only partially help your robot visitors. Something more is needed - content design.

Web Site Navigation:

Good navigation is the basis for a good web site. Human visitors are usually seeking something specific and they can interpret text and image labels rationally. A human can even follow up a web address even if it is not coded as a link.

A robot seeks valid links and tries to follow them one-by-one, in the order they appear in the page coding. The path through your site may be excellent for a rational human visitor, but not to a robot. Review your navigation with this in mind.

Page Content:

Robots regard the words and phrases used most often on your site as the most important aspects of your web site. Similarly, the words and phrases most used on a web page linking to yours, and on sites you link to, are regarded as important to your content.

Your task is to write text which is meaningful to a human and to a robot. This includes providing different keyword phrases in different pages to draw a robot's attention to different aspects of your content. Hence, each page has to be optimised, often professionally.

Keyword Placement:

Keywords must be placed appropriately to help the robots and without irritating your human visitors:-

• what keywords to use
• how often to insert them into text
• the appropriate places to use them
• in what context to use them

Your keywords are determined by your business profile, e.g. if your business is regional, the name of the region is important. Other examples are:-

• your industry sector
• your USP (unique selling point)
• associated third party brand names
• generic phrases describing your products/services (e.g. for FOCUS these would be : web hosting, web design, domains...)
• relevant keywords used by your direct competitors

Having established and applied your main keywords, ongoing review of your ranking is essential. There may be additional keywords you should be using; changing situations may indicate new keywords; new players might take a position above yours and existing players might revamp their own web site for ranking enhancement.

Conclusion:

Basic optimisation can be done by all site owners with the time to do the research and to work on their sites. To go further, independent assessment and expert consultancy is needed.

See also our Search Engines FAQ.

Contact us for Search Engine Consultancy.