Internet search engines account for a large percentage
of visitors to your site. By observing a few commonsense rules
in the design of your web site you can make the most of this
form of marketing.
First thing is we we always recommend that our
clients don't rely on search engine generated traffic to make
their
web site worthwhile, search engines are too fickle to be relied
upon, let me tell you why.
There are 1,000's of different search engines.
Although only a few account for the lions share of the market
it's not
unusual
to
come across
someone
using
a search
engine
we've never heard of.
The different search engines,
in an effort to offer better results,
use different criteria to categorise web sites.
Google, for example uses over 100 criteria to categorise each
web site. To complicate things further search engines
regularly alter the way in which they categorise web sites.
All of this will help you see why ranking consistently
high on search engine results is a moving feast.
What is the answer? Well, if you ask a hundred
web designers you'll probably get 100 different responses. Our
advice is to design in a reasonable balance of search engine
optimisation techniques rather than struggle with
constant optimisation to the nth degree.
We suggest you start by doing the easiest and
most standard things, that is, work out the best text for
your front page (around two hundred words) and image "ALT" tags,
using your selected key words and phrases where ever possible,.
These key words and phrases must be based around
common terms that your target audience would use to find a company
like yours.
If you have a product or service that is very common online
then you are best to try for key words a bit left of centre.
Statistics prove that 80% of people do not go past the first
page of search engine results, with an average search giving
you more than 100,000 results (10,000 pages of results) the
chances of coming up on the first result page using the most
likely search terms are slim.
To further differentiate you in searches you
should, if your business operates a specific geographic area
(i.e.
is not
worldwide),
use place
names in your site wording, i.e. Australia, Melbourne,
Fitzroy, or even all the capital cities in the geographic area
you service.
Other key factors in getting and maintaining
a reasonable showing in search engines is to regularly alter
and add content and new pages, seek reciprocal links to web
pages that offer quality content which is similar to or compliments
yours.
If all the above sounds like a lot to learn,
it is. There is now an industry developed around search engine
optimisation of web sites and many people earn large amounts
of money by getting their clients web sites into the top position
for desired keywords. |
