In this issue, we'll explore how to build search engine exposure, and discuss techniques you can use in your next site redesign.
How can you make sure people find your site? Today, people are more likely than ever to head to Google instead of the yellow pages. Making sure your site is optimized for the keywords people are searching can be a low-cost way of boosting web site traffic, but it does take some planning and ongoing effort to make sure your site attracts attention. In this article, we'll explore some basic best practices that can help your site stand out.
Before you start optimizing your site with keywords, it's important to make sure they're the right words. Most likely, if your company uses internal jargon, people outside the company aren't going to search for it. Put yourself in your customers' shoes and think about what they're likely to search for.
A few good tools for finding terms people are actively searching for are Overture's Keyword Selector Tool, Google's Keyword Selection Tool, and Wordtracker. Researching some of your key words here can help you find relevant phrases people are actively searching.
I've worked on many sites where the management team wants to use as many industry-related words as possible, or target multiple search phrases, but are surprised when their traffic does not jump. Keep your list of target keywords to 20 or less, and your target phrases to 5 or so. By optimizing your site for these few key words phrases, you might miss a few visitors, but will capture the most relevant ones.
Search engines can only index what they can see: HTML text within the body of your page and specially-coded tags. If your site's content is buried within an attractive graphic or Flash movie, it's probably invisible to search engines. The easiest way to increase your visibility is to provide some relevant, searchable text on your home page. Don't stop there, however; you'll want to use your target phrases throughout your site, not just your landing page. While coming up as the first result is your main goal, filling slots two through five with individual pages from your site can be just as effective.
Search engines give special weight to certain types of text content, specifically page titles, headers, metadata, and hyperlinks. Without getting too technical, here are some more places to put your target search terms:
Among the many special tactics you can employ to boost your rankings, one of the easiest is to create a sitemap that links to every page of your site, and link to that sitemap page from every page of your site. This helps search engines find your pages in a short amount of time, since they'll probably only index a few levels deep with each visit.
One of the most effective ways to boost your relevance to search engines is to have other sites point to yours. We'll cover this in depth in a future article, but start by requesting links from your vendors, customers, partners, and the industry associations you belong to. The more links you have pointing to your site, the more relevant the search engines will consider you in results pages, especially when the text links pointing to you contain one of your key phrases.
