Handling search engines

Internet Search Engines – 4 Biggest Search Factors According to Google

alexthewebmaster — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 06:21:16 +0000

I was using Google’s video search yesterday and stumbled upon some of Matt Cutts’s videos. For those of you unfamiliar with Matt Cutts, Matt works for Google handling search engine optimization issues, answering many common questions on his blog as well as his videos.

Basically Matt Cutts is the gate keeper for how sites get ranked on Google search.

Although some of the videos are now nearly a year old, they are still very relevant, with a lot of helpful, straightforward information.

In one of the most interesting videos Matt reveals the top four biggest search ranking factors. From top to bottom here they are:

Crawlability
Sitemap
Good Content
Marketing

Crawlability

Crawlability refers to the ability for a search engine to read the content on your website and get through it, navigating to each page. Crawlability may not seem like it should be an issue dozens of years after the birth of the internet, but according to Matt it is still a major problem, with many sites being un-crawlable. This is definitely something we’ve witnessed with many web designers opting to create websites entirely with photos, embedding text, links, etc. in unreadable photo files – it may look nice, but to a search engine it is valueless.

Sitemap

Sitemaps are pages that reference every other page, much like a book’s index or table of contents. It is just one place for a user (or search engine) to visit in order to find everything on a site, or quickly find just one thing. Having a sitemap referenced on every page is a great search booster and very user-friendly addition to any site.

Good Content

Good content is a major factor in determining a sites value. Besides some rumors that Google has hired librarians, english professors, and is using its book scanning project to learn more about the flow and style of correct human generated text, good content is essential in attracting visitors, getting those visitors to return, and getting others to link to your site.

Marketing

Spread the word about your site, write good content (see above) and start spreading the word. You are only limited by your imagination in the number of ways you can market your site on or off line. Create plans to write articles and back them up with a supplemental print and e-newsletter. Attend local events with pamphlets on your website, include your website at the bottom of each email you or your colleagues send out. You must actively market your site.

SEO: For Search Engines or Humans

alexthewebmaster — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 10:29:27 +0000

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is something that many webmasters are now obsessing over. Many web site owners are spending countless hours tweaking and modifying their web sites, adding keyword rich content, and spending hours obtaining back links, so that their site will rank higher in search engines. It is true that over 90% of all web surfers use search engines to visit sites on a regular basis, but should web masters and web site designers build and tweak sites for search engines, or for their visitors?

The answer to this question is that when you build a web site, you are not targeting web search engine crawlers, you are targeting people and human visitors. Hence, you should build a web site for humans, not search engines. The whole purpose to create a web site is so that you can get traffic. Without traffic, a web site is worthless. No matter how many features and how functional your site is, without traffic, your design and functionality do not matter. Although search engines can help bring in traffic, web sites that are designed for search engines, are often not designed for human visitors and all the traffic that your web site gets will be worthless. Visitors will visit and then soon leave your web site and not return again. Return visitors are critical for the success of any web site.

One good example of optimizing for search engines purely is some webmasters tend to stuff tons of keywords into the Meta-Tags; this is a very bad practice and will get the site blacklisted. Moreover, this black hat technique does not benefit the users.

Hence, when building a web site, one should build it for human visitors. If you have articles that are too keyword dense, the quality of the writing will not be as high as it should, and quite frankly, many of your visitors will be annoyed if you keep using words such as “mesothelioma” or “home insurance loan” to get your web site high in the search rankings for these terms. They will leave your web site and most likely not return. If you create a web site where content is created for people to read and is well written, chances are you will get many return visitors who like the quality of the content you provide and come back frequently to read any new content you may have added. The more people that visit and link to your web site, the more popular it well become and naturally, it will be ranked higher in search engines.

Also, rather than spending hours building links for SEO purposes, that time could be better spent on adding features to your web site which would prompt more people to return to your site and stay at your web site for a longer period of time.

In conclusion, although spending lot of time on SEO and increasing your search engine rankings in the short run, the visitors you get from your SEO efforts will not be valuable as chances are they will not visit again. If you build your web sites for people, your traffic will grow and search engine rankings will rise naturally. Hence, the best way to build a successful web site is to build for people and allow your web site to naturally move up search engine rankings.

Role of headlines in “Optimization” of websites

alexthewebmaster — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 14:02:38 +0000

Headlines originated from newspapers because newspapers targeted to induce the reader to read the full article after reading just the headline. This is possible only if the headline is attention grabbing and written handsomely responsive, in simple words we can say saying more in few words. All users these days are in a hurry to find their desired information or product from a website once they are diverted to the site by any search engine or a link. On arriving at the website their interest is to find information as soon as possible and not surfing coolly each and every page of the site. Headlines on the home page of a site aid the users in finding exactly what they are looking for and thus are of immense importance.

Headlines play a vital role in optimization of a website too because they are friendly to the search engines as headlines are always in the form of links on the homepage or other parts of a site and spiders readily follow links moreover it adds to your sites internal linking which in turn is a very positive contributor towards site ranking and indexing. Secondly when keywords are placed in headlines then it works in a better way.

Headline presentation in your site, typically on the home page, increases the readability of your website by separating the text and main points. The most vital parts of your website are highlighted well and you avoid the chances of missing attention to those parts by the visitors. You are almost assured that the coming user will find what he/she is looking for and most importantly those pages offering your special offers and products or the base of your website. For many years direct marketers have found that quick-read headlines have brought in the readers and to certain degree converted to buyers.

Headlines can provide the following advantages:

Increase readability of the website.
Reader time is saved; less effort is required on the user’s part.
Headline depicts the price directly and only very sincere buyers are induced to go further.
Product availability is depicted in clear terms, assures buyers that product is readily available.

Headlines when accompanied with keywords can bring fabulous results at search engines.