Roxy's Blog

The web is awesome.  You can find just about anything -- just Google it.  From a user standpoint this is great, but from a website owner's standpoint the question is ... How do I get my page to show up in those search results?

Step One: Optimizing

Google Webmaster Tools is a great place to start to optimize your website for search engines.  If you already have a Google ID, then you can use that to create your Webmaster Tools account.  Once you have verified your site, Google will do a thorough crawl and give you a detailed report on your site. Using this report, you can correct any deficiencies in your site structure. [As part of this process you will need to produce and XML sitemap]. 

Step Two: Page Structure

 Search engines don't look at your pages the way browsers do.  Search engine crawlers look at:

• Page URL 
• Page meta data 
  • the title, 
  • keywords,
  • description and 
• the content on the page

In other words, they crawl down the page and verify each part.  The more these parts have in common, the better the "rank" for that page will be.

Example

Each piece of the page repeats the information.  In the body text the keywords should be repeated several times ... they are keywords after all. The title and description you enter are what a search engine will display for that page when it is returned in search results.  It is a free form of advertising. Use care when constructing your pages.

See Top Ten Tips for Improved Search Engine Placement for a good overview of Best Practices to achieve good search engine ranking.