Getting Noticed by Search Engines.

Getting a website noticed involves a great deal of thought and planning so don't think you can sit back and visitors will come flocking because I guarantee that they won't!

So how do you attract visitors?  Well as mentioned elsewhere, advertise - include the website address on your stationery, on business cards, in email signatures, on promotional material and gifts - use your imagination.  People advertise websites all the time and some even resort to TV advertising but that's not an option for most of us so we have to work at it

First you need to submit your website to the main 'search engines' such as Google, Yahoo, Lycos and Yell, not to mention many others.  Submitting just tells the search engines that your website exists and invites them to have a look at it, in the hope that it will be included in the list of websites that people search for, but don't count on it yet!

Page Titles - they're the text that appears at the top of your browser window, telling you what page you're on.  The page title should be relevant to the page itself.  Each of the pages of a website must have a unique page title that is relevant to that page.  Unique page titles will increase the chance for each page to be indexed properly.  In some cases search engines will stop indexing a website simply because each page has the same title and so it presumes they are all the same. 

Meta Tags - They provide information at the beginning of each page that the user doesn't see but search engines do!  They provide descriptions of the page (and the website) so they must be relevant.  In particular 'keywords' are words and perhaps more importantly, phrases, that describe the page content so they must relate to the website and specifically the page content - in other words relevant.  It is extracts from meta tags that will be displayed in the listing when people search for your website so it makes sense to be sure they convey the required messages and reflect what people will search for.

Links -  It is most important that you establish internal links that are search engine friendly.   Search engines read html links more easily than other types of files.  Therefore it makes sense to use as many HTML links as you can and don't expect a search engine to find links that are embedded inside PHP coded scripts because if it can't read them, it will ignore them or worse still, give up the indexing.

Site Map - To allow better indexing of all the pages of your site you should include a site map.  This is a special file that sits alongside your web pages on the server, usually called sitemap.xml or something similar.  This will help the search engine 'crawlers' and 'spiders' to crawl every page of the website by telling them what pages there are and where to find them. It also contains other information such as the last time it (and the website) was updated and how often it is normally updated.  If there are any pages you don't want to appear in the search engines, you will also need a 'robot' file which is basically a simple text file with a list of disallowed pages. Anything listed there will be ignored but if the robot file is not found, everything will be indexed.

Finding appropriate keywords can be a nightmare task and too complex to cover in detail.  Nevertheless the principal is simple enough - you include relevant words and especially phrases in your design - namely those that people are most likely to search for, the greater your chance of success.  In practice it is less simple, requiring much forethought and planning and regular reviews.

None of this information is visible to your website visitors but it is as vitally important as any other file in your website so when people search, it is crucial that what they're searching for matches your keywords, descriptions, and page titles - that's what search engines are there for!

Another very useful way of getting visitors is to have links to your website from other (quality) websites so if you have associates or friends or even other businesses who are prepared to include a link in their own websites, this is perhaps the most effective way to attract visitors - and the search engines will often provide a higher listing to sites that have external links to them since they also search for links when checking or 'spidering' websites.

What you must NEVER do is try to trick the search engines by using techniques such as keyword stuffing, hidden text, search engine cloaking, duplicate sites and link farms.  Search engines can identify such tricks so don't discredit your site by using them.  They are more likely to penalize your site for tricking them and your ranking will remain consistently low or even disappear altogether.

This merely scratches the surface of website promotion and there are people out there whose full-time occupation is the promotion of websites, otherwise known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).  Often they use sophisticated and expensive software to help them but by far the most important part is to regularly review, update and maintain your website -  this is discussed elsewhere...

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Last Updated 06/08/2008