Search Engine Optimisation

One of the best ways for people to find your web site is if they use a search engine.

Popular Search Engines

There are lots of different search engines, most will allow you to search using keywords or a by selecting a specific category to narrow down your search. They work by using computer programmes called robots or spiders to follow links on web pages and index the keywords on each page as they progress. They use this index of keywords to match the search text that is entered.

Getting Listed

Getting listed on a search engine can mean the difference between your site receiving one or one thousand visitors a week. There a number of things you can to to try and get listed, but there are no guaranteed ways to get listed.

You could to visit each individual search engine web site and enter your details, but this would be very time consuming. A good way to get listed is to take care how you write your HTML code. These simple steps will help you get noticed and indexed by search engines.

  • Always put a different and descriptive title in the <title> tag of every page,
  • Make sure you include a <description> META tag on every page. You could use similar but slightly more detailed wording to the <title> tag,
  • You can include a <keywords> META tag on every page (with keywords specific to the content of the page) but most search engines will select their own keywords from your page content.
  • Make sure you use heading tags <h1> to <h6> in a logical order. Search engines may treat text in a heading differently than normal text.
  • Use descriptive text in hyperlinks as search engines will often give hyperlink text more importance when selecting keywords.
  • Search engine robots will consider directory and file names when indexing pages, so make the names of your HTML files and directories logical. For example a file called page_design.html in a web_design directory will get a better chance of being indexed than a file called page1.html in a directory called site.
  • Try and get links to your web site on other reputable web sites!

These are web sites and software that will apply your details to some search engines;

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These services / software will have a time limited or feature limited trial period, then you have to pay to continue to use the service or buy the full version of the software. The major search engines are aware of the tricks and techniques these services use to get good rankings, so they periodically change the way their robots operate to avoid sites getting unfair advantage.