subject: Rev up your search engines [print this page] Rev up your search engines Rev up your search engines
When your customers are looking for a product or service online, they will often use a search engine, such as Google or Bing. Most searchers only visit the results towards the top of the list, so for the chance to snare a customer you want your web site to be up there on page one or two.
There is no single magic formula for appearing at the top of search result lists without paying. (All search engines have a section of paid-for advertisement links at the top of the page, ahead of the unpaid standard list of results). But there are free ways to tweak your web site's content with the potential to move your site up the list. To explain how, it's best to start by understanding how search engines work.
One key way in which search engines measure the importance of a web page is by seeing how many other people like it enough to link to it from their own web sites. Google designed a system called page rank which works on the idea that if something is being recommended by others it is more likely to be good.
It follows then that you should make sure you get other people to link to your site from their own and put links on your site to relevant and important sites in your field.
Besides cross-linking, search engines index web sites automatically by reading their content and using sets of rules called ranking algorithms to determine what web sites are about and how useful and reliable they are. This information, covering trillions of pages on the internet, is stored in an index, which is constantly updated and then used to determine the results returned whenever a new search is performed.
You can attempt to influence those algorithms through a process called search engine optimisation (often abbreviated to SEO). However, the ability to do this is often overstated.
Search engines make money by selling advertisements, a model which depends on their sites having large audiences. That audience will turn to rival services if the results they get appear to be heavily influenced by advertisers, rather than providing useful listings. For those two reasons, search engines keep their precise algorithms a closely guarded secret, and they tweak them regularly. So, if anyone tells you they know exactly how to get your site to the top of the rankings even a professional search engine optimisation consultancy take their claims with a reasonable pinch of salt.
But there are a few things we do know. Search engines rely largely on the words you use on your web site and they count how regularly words appear across each page on your site. Words which appear frequently in your content are considered key words by the ranking algorithms. When the searcher types a request into a search engine, it picks out the key works and delivers the results which best match them.
To raise your site's profile with the search engines, think like a customer and work out what their key search terms will be. List the words which searchers would use. If you are a plumber, for example, common searches could be emergency plumber, boiler repair or leaking pipe. Common search terms will produce millions of web results, though, so be as specific as possible, perhaps including your geographical area, or business specialisation. Once you have your list of key words, there are a number of places on your web site you can put them, so search engines can find them.
The search engine will almost always look to see what words are in the "title" of your web page. This isn't the headline on the page, though that can also have an important influence on how indexing works. To put it simply, if you look at a document in your browser, at the top of the document, right at the very top of the browser above the address line, there is a bar across the top. Whatever is in that bar is the title.
Because of the importance of the title in ranking pages, your key words should be in your title. Your web site designer will be able to change the words in your title easily.
A search engine also reads the words on your web page. So make sure that the words from your list are prominent.
Another thing to consider is how the search engine reads the pages of your site. It moves through each page, following every link. So, make it easy for the search engine and ensure each page of your site is linked. Include a site map which shows all the content on one page. Once again, your web site builder can do this for you.
