Making Your Web Site More Effective, cont - 2
Making Your Web Site More Effective Search Engine Rankings
Search Engine Rankings
Because every search engine "indexes" (catalogs) web pages differently, there is no one set of rules to follow when building your web site to insure that it will rank highly on all of these search engines.
In general, web pages that rank highly in search engine searches pay particular attention to the following details:
- Keywords in Content - The best way to rank highly in a search engine search is to have content on your web page that relates to keyword searches that a potential client might use in a search engine search. For example, if you are a personal injury attorney, it would be to your advantage to use terms like"personal injury," "car accidents," and "medical bills," etc. throughout your web site. Make sure these uses make sense (as in a description of your practice) and are not just loaded into pages to increase their search engine rankings. If certain keywords are used excessively, a search engine may determine that you are trying to "spam" the keyword and not index your site at all.
- Meta-tags - These "KEYWORDS" and "DESCRIPTION" (meta-tags) are invisible notes to search engines (contained in your web page's HTML code) that help search engines categorize your web pages.
- HTML Comments - While HTML comments are invisible to the visitors to your web site, some search engines will read words or phrases in these HTML comments and treat them as actual textual content of the page. Here again you must be careful not to engage in "keyword spamming" or a search engine might ignore your site.
- Inbound Links - Some search engines (including the popular Google search engine that powers Yahoo) use the number of detected incoming links to your web site as an indicator of its usefulness and popularity (the logic being, if other web sites link to you, then you must have worthwhile content).
Tell the Search Engines Where to Find You
Waiting for the search engines to find you would be like waiting for clients in that office we mentioned earlier without an address or a sign.
The most efficient way to get the search engines to index your site is to register your site individually with each of the most popular search engines. Just like their search strategies, every search engine has a different method for submitting new web sites for consideration. When visiting your favorite search engine, find its "Add URL" link to see what its process entails.
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