Netparkone - ICT In Business - Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation

This describes the process of making your site visible on search engines like Google.

The first thing to understand here is the difference between a Search Engine (Eg Google, MSN, Ask Jeeves, AltaVista and Lycos) and directories (Eg Yahoo, DMOZ and Yell).

Search Engines “crawl” the web looking for web pages and index the content of those pages in a database. When you do a search, the search engine looks in the database and finds pages with matching content. So what you find relates directly to the text on the page. The order in which pages are listed is determined by a number of factors, which combine to give a ranking of how “important” the site is compared with others. In the case of Google, this is called the Page Rank value. Pages with a higher page rank appear first. To find out more see http://www.google.com/technology/.

Let’s say you are an Acupuncturist working in Leeds. Ideally, you will want your website to be listed on the first page when someone types “Acupuncturist in Leeds” into Google and other top search engines. You will need to make sure that the words Acupuncturist and Leeds are featured prominently in key places on your page, such as in the Page Title, headings and body text. Words in graphics (images) are not searched, only HTML text. You should then get as many sites as possible to link to your site, eg through directory listings (see below), from trade organisations or partner sites, netparkone has its own reciprocal links section.

Directories are the online equivalent of a phone book like the Yellow Pages. Your business will be listed in the directory and will be categorised. You may also have a product/service description and keywords. This is what will be searched when a user visits the directory, not the content of your website.

At some stage you are likely to be contacted (probably by spam email) by companies who claim to be able to be able to increase your site traffic by orders of magnitude, often by submitting to 1000s of unknown search engines. Be wary of these offers, some can even be counter-productive. There are no magical answers to increasing site traffic, but there are some common sense rules. The advice given by Google at http://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/ is a good starting point.