Tips for Search Engine Success

Sometimes you feel that your Web site is lost among the billion pages on the Web when search engines bring up all possible websites and not your own. For your Web site to be noticed in the major search engines and directories, you need to take some steps to ensure that your pages appear on more search engines. It is not enough if you simply create a page and put it on the Web. You have to enhance its appearance and it needs to be overwhelming to throw aside other pages. There are some crucial tips you must catch hold of to optimize the visibility of your Web pages on the major search engines.

You must follow Search engine optimization techniques, which will give your pages a stand among other top ranking sites.

• Develop Good subject matter - Content is King!

• Concentrate on relevant Keywords and Key Phrases

• Follow Search Engine Optimization Techniques

• Obey the Search Engine permissible Guidelines
   

The first and the best thing you can do to achieve high search engine ratings is to have good content. People who visit your site must find it worthy to recommend it to others. Not only by word of mouth but by creating web links to your site as they feel your content has something that their own website visitors will appreciate. Search engines know that a page has relevant  content by counting the number of other web links to the page. The more incoming links to your site the higher your reputation and relevancy to the search engines and thus the higher demand for that site. If you don't have good information, your site loses its users and becomes anonymous.

How to achieve Great Content

Whatever you offer must be easily understood by everyone and offer value or information or entertainment to the readers. It can be difficult if not impossible to be over enthusiastic about the merits of an electric kettle if its simply another product you are trying to sell. This doesn't prevent you from providing other information that is relevant within your site such as the latest electricity saving schemes or the origins and history of electricity generation. The fact that it has no real relationship to the electric kettle is of no importance but what it does do is bring visitors to your site for other reasons and then they see the kettle you are trying to sell. This is perhaps a little over simplistic but the core of the idea is to offer real content and interest to get the visitors to your site in the first place.

Avoid extravagant jargon, unless you're writing something highly technical that requires jargon to make it understandable. If this is the case then your target audience will be of a technical nature anyway but don't pepper your site with terms and phrases that the man in the street will find confusing - they will simply leave your site and not return. The average duration of a visitor to your site may a matter of a few minutes so you really need to grab their attention or show them the product they were looking for as soon as they arrive.

Make sure the pages that people find do have the content they are supposed to. When they land on one of your pages having searched for a particular product or service then they expect to find it immediately along with a price for a product or a guide to what you provide if its a service or other relevant information.

If your keyword for a page is only slipped in to make it rank higher but the actual page has no real relevance to that keyword then you will eventually be penalised. This is keyword stuffing and the search engines are not ignorant in the spidering techniques they use. The algorithms that Google have in place and which they are continuously developing are aimed at weeding out such pages along with Spam factories and Malware sites and all the other nefarious sites around the globe. 

Make sure your writing is grammatically correct, properly punctuated, and that all words are spelled correctly.

Do not deviate from your topic. You must aim at an elegant page that provides adequate information for that product or service you provide. If your topic involves complex matter that might run into pages, break it into several shorter pages that are relevant to the main theme.

Update your pages regularly with the latest information. If you maintain the regularity and consistency of the data, the viewers will be interested in visiting your pages. They suggest it to others.

Do not include excessive graphics. Search engines read only text and your beautiful images are of little importance to them. A page made up of too many graphics with little text is essentially negligible to a search engine. Search engines will measure the ration of text to code on your pages and the higher text to code ratio you can generate the higher your relevancy will be. Images mean code so try to reduce your reliance on images and fill that extra space with highly informative text if you can. This page you are reading is made up like this:

Web Page Size : 21953 Bytes
Code Size : 11421 Bytes
Text Size : 10532 Bytes
Code to Text Ratio : 47.98 %

For a product page you obviously need quality images so its a combination of optimum sizing and using ALT tags along with relevant text.

After creating a page, do not relax. Submit it instantly to a search engine.

Concentrate on Keywords

Keywords are the most important words on your site. They are Key to Search Engine Success. They express themselves to the search engines all about your page and what makes it unique and different from others on the web. High Density of a few words tops the appearance of your page. As a general rule, your keywords should make up anywhere between 3% to 10% of the text on your page. Make sure they appear in main headings, section headers. Plan your paragraphs so that the keywords appear somewhere in the introduction, content and conclusion sentences. These simple guidelines would get you closer to optimal visibility of your page. Use H1 tags and BOLD sections of the text or key phrases or individual words to indicate these words are more important than the surrounding text.

How to select better keywords  

You should avoid commonly used keywords because you'll be competing with millions of other pages for a search engine's attention. Make them as specific as possible. If you must use popular keywords because that's what your page is about, combine them with other words to make phrases that people might search for.  Your keywords can be two or three word phrases that your customers might use to search. Also use a few synonyms of the keyword in your text. The idea is to use keywords that are common enough so that the "typical" searcher might use them, but unique enough to avoid millions of pages being returned in a search result.

Keywords used by searchers

You can easily find out which keywords and key phrases are being submitted to search engines. Google provides some very useful tools for this very purpose as does Overture and Yahoo. You must spend some time analysing this information to know the requirements of the users and in what way you can improve the quality and content of your page. Tracking software on your own website will yield the keywords that brought visitors to your site and the pages they landed on allowing you to fine tune the pages to your visitor requirements. It takes time but it is well worth the investment in giving you a higher visitor to buyer ratio.

Many references can be found for a single keyword. Just try to experiment with different combinations of words to find the most useful keywords for your site. 

Search engines ignore the most common words - and, if, when, where etc. etc.. These are called stop words, because the engines don't bother to stop to read them.

Follow Search Engine Optimization Techniques

Make an effort to keep your web site fresh, especially if you want to get repeat visitors. If a site is static, people will stop visiting it again and again, but if there is always something new, people will often drop by just to see what's changed. The web allows you to control how your information is presented. You can definitely gain from it.

You might need to think about doing a complete site redesign every few months,  not only to make it look attractive, but it also gives you the opportunity to take advantage of newer technology in a better way . This also helps to improve your site as time goes on, as you'll invariably learn better techniques. Use the time you have now in the planning stages to ensure the site you design can be easily modified in the future if you want a new look. Think about using styles sheets and CSS to generate the look of your pages and then it is a simple task to change the entire look of the site.

The implementation of strict XHTML formatting of web pages is becoming more and more important and it won't be so long before it becomes a critical part of web design. Think about putting this in place now along with CSS style sheets and make your site future proof and easy to modify.

Follow these guidelines to make your page look elegant.

• Focus on a single theme throughout the site.

• Split your information into logical sections especially if it is large

• Make sure your home page is attractive and well laid out.

• Try to use colours, styles and fonts that complement each other.

Ensure that you don't minimize the importance of layout and design. The style and look of a web site is subjective, and everybody will have their own idea of what looks good.  It's important to keep in mind that when you develop a web site, you have to cater to the widest possible audience because everybody will not have the same browser you do, with the same graphics settings, or the same operating system. It might look great on your screen, but it might look awful on somebody else. Do not assume that all your users use the same kind of browsers or operating systems.

Try to test your pages to see how they look with

• Some of the widely used browsers

• Different size screens

• Text-only browser (or images turned off)

• Different colour resolution