Before you put a lot of time and energy into search engine visibility and online marketing, your first priority should be making sure your web site is ready to do its job: convert traffic into customers.
Here are some basic rules and guidelines for making your web site more search engine-friendly, listed in no particular order.
Site Design
1. Don’t overdo the graphics. Most importantly, make sure any text on your site is actual text — not part of a graphic with words. Your visitors can read the text on your graphics, but a search engine can’t. Search engine crawlers love text; give them plenty of it, so they can learn what each page of your site is about.
2. Try to have at least one text-based site menu. Your main site menu might be made up of small, graphical buttons that change colors or show some effect when the user puts her mouse above the image — and that’s fine. Assuming you’re not using a poorly-written javascript or DHTML code, the crawlers will be able to follow these graphical links to other pages on your site just fine. But it’s still a good idea to have one text-based site menu — you often see this in the footer of the site, though many professional designers are using text for the main menu, too.
3. Don’t have a Flash-based home (or “splash”) page. It’s not user-friendly. Think about it: How often do you actually watch the Flash movie when you hit this kind of home page? Probably very rarely. Maybe once, if it’s a novelty. But after that, it’s a nuisance and you’re clicking that SKIP INTRO button like everyone else.
If you’re putting something on your web site that says SKIP THIS, you’re admitting it’s a mistake. As far back as 2003, Marketing Sherpa reported that 80% of consumers hate Flash intros. You can bet that, as users have become more accustomed to getting information quickly from the web, that number would be even higher today.
4. Don’t use frames to build your site. A frame-based site is difficult to link to. Other people can link to your home page, but probably not to your product pages, your articles, your newsletters, etc. You want other sites linking to you as much as possible; more quality links from other sites generally means better search engine rankings. Avoid using frames, and you’ll make it easier for others to link to you.
Site Content
1. Every page on your site should be focused on as narrow a topic as possible. If you have, for example, 8 different products that you sell, you don’t want to discuss all 8 in detail on a single page. Instead, give each product its own page. This way, your page about Green Widgets will have a better chance to be found when someone searches for [green widgets].
2. Write accurate, relevant page titles. Just as each page should have unique content, each page should also have a unique title element. It should describe the page content as concisely as possible. Your page about Green Widgets, for example, might have nothing more than Green Widgets from XYZ Widgets as the page title.
3. Don’t worry about the “keywords” meta tag; do worry about the “description” meta tag. While there are a couple search engines that will look at the keywords meta tag, its impact is incredibly minimal and you can skip using it altogether. Instead, devote your attention to writing strong and unique “description” meta tags for every page on your site. The content in the “description” meta tag will often appear as the snippet of text below your listing in the SERPs, so a well-written description can persuade searchers to click your link.
4. Keep adding fresh content on a regular basis. A frequently-updated site won’t necessarily rank higher in the SERPs, but the more often you add good content to your site (articles, newsletters, announcements, blog posts, etc.), the more often the crawlers will visit your site. The benefit, then, is that when you add a new product or service, the crawlers will find and index the page(s) sooner — no waiting weeks or months for the new product to be found in the SERPs.
5. Write for your users first and foremost, but don’t forget that search engines are “reading” your site, too. When writing for the web, your content has to be understandable to the people visiting your site. At the same time, you want to be sure to include the appropriate words and phrases that will match what people are searching for at Google, Yahoo, etc. Just don’t overdo it and repeat the same word or phrase five times in paragraph! There’s no magic formula or perfect “keyword density” — write for your users so the pages are readable, but be sure to include the right search terms as you write.
