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Search Engine Basics
- making your website count
Written
by Shirley Lichti - May 22, 2008
Over 85% of people online use search engines on a daily basis.
As online search becomes more efficient, Internet users have grown
impatient with anything less than great results. An emarketer.com
study showed that while almost 70% of respondents click a search
result within the first page of results, very few venture beyond
the third page of results.
This has many companies working hard to increase the visibility
and ranking of their sites. Yet, as I've discovered, great rankings
on the World Wide Web are not of much value if your company only
does business in a limited geography.
For example, when I went to Google.ca and searched for "Marketing
Magic", my site snagged spots number one and two on the first
page out of 819,000 hits. After a momentary wave of euphoria, reality
sank in. While it's great to have high rankings, my business would
be a lot healthier if my site attracted more local target audiences
to use consulting services or attend an upcoming Marketing Mastery
Workshop instead.
For me, this meant figuring out how to increase my local visibility
on the web. To do this necessitated acquiring a more in-depth understanding
of search engines and search engine optimization (SEO.) There's
lots of information available on these topics. Unfortunately, much
of it is full of technical jargon, too complex for the layperson.
While I don't profess to be an SEO expert, I thought I'd share
some insights I've learned that may help you in your efforts to
increase your company's visibility on the web. Since the subject
is too broad to cover in one article, I'll be tackling it over a
series of articles.
The first article will look at a few search fundamentals. In the
future, I'll examine On Page tactics, Off Page tactics, and strategies
for attracting local traffic. (Don't worry if On Page and Off Page
sound like Greek - I promise to explain them in a future article!)
Let's start with some basics. Spiders, or crawlers, build a search
engine's database by visiting web pages, reading text, meta tags,
and following links. This information is stored in an index. When
people search for a topic, the search engine refers back to its
index to find matches and then presents them ranked in order of
relevance.
Although you might be thinking this is pretty straightforward,
it raises some questions. Perhaps the most important question is
whether search engines have been able index all the pages in your
site. If your site isn't fully indexed, not all of your pages show
up. This means prospective customers searching the web may never
find your company.
SEO
TIP:
If you don't know if all your pages
are indexed, it's easy to find out. Simply go to any browser (e.g.
Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, msn) and in the search box, type
Site:www.marketingmagic.ca substituting your own web URL of course.
It will give you a list of all the pages from your site that are
indexed.
SEO
TIP: If they aren't all listed, there are
ways to fix this. The easiest approach is to simply show links at
the bottom of every page that link to other pages. Click on this
link to see
an example. If your site is large and has too many pages for this
approach, you can add a site map that includes a listing of every
page on the site that spiders can read and index.
SEO experts claim you need to have an XML Site Map, which requires
more technical skills than most lay marketers have. My site does
not have an XML Site Map yet all pages are indexed so I'm not 100%
convinced of this claim. (I'll let you know if I learn more about
this in a future article.)
SEO
TIP:
You should also check to find out the last date
your site was indexed just to make sure that search engines aren't
using out of date pages. To do this, follow the same procedure as
above and key Cache:www.marketingmagic.ca using your own company
URL.
As an example, there is a page on my website for the Marketing
Mastery Workshop. It's recently been updated to reflect an upcoming
workshop on June 18 so I checked to see when this page had last
been indexed. I learned that the last cache date was February 24,
a date that doesn't reflect the most current information.
In my case this hasn't caused a problem because the descriptive
information the search engine displays doesn't include the workshop
date. And if people click through on the link provided, they land
on the updated page. But this might present a problem for other
pages.
SEO
TIP: If, like me, you are working to increase
your knowledge of SEO, you can find free tools at Google
Webmaster Central that will help you understand what Google
knows about your site. These tools answer your questions about crawling
and indexing and so on. There are also good resources, for example
Google Analytics, to help you optimize your site so local traffic
can find you.
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