You want your website to be found by a prospective customer on a search, so you want your listing shown on the first page of search results. Because Google and Bing use somewhat different criteria for ranking sites and because the criteria change or are tweaked from time to time — and are not published — some firms practicing the arcane art of search engine optimization (SEO) grew to take advantage of website owners' willingness to pay for the promise of top search results, and they used subterfuges like link farms to achieve temporary results.
But the principles of search are straightforward. The basic criterion for inclusion in search listings is the relevance of the page content to the user's search. A well-written page on a specific theme or topic, designed and coded in compliance with web standards, and emphasizing its relevance with appropriate keywords, will nearly always be found — once the page is indexed — when a user searches for that topic. But it will likely take time, continuing effort and fresh content, and in-bound links indicating credibility to be listed in a favorable position. Meanwhile, paid search (pay per click), a form of on-line search advertising, can compensate for the low listing of a new site.
Once, to get indexed, site owners had to submit their sites to a multitude of search engines. While a new site can be submitted to the two main search engines in a few minutes, the Big Two now actively search out new sites daily through links from indexed websites and blogs, though it will still take some time for indexing. For local businesses, Google will promptly display a site registered in its Google Places or Local Business Center.
Yes, there are some design techniques that can improve a site's search results, though not overnight. They are explained below and will always be followed by a good custom website designer, though rarely on a template-based site. In addition, a site owner/editor can significantly improve the site's search ranking over time by judicious link-building — requesting links from other relevant and respected sites. However, buying links on irrelevant sites or link farms will likely hurt rather than help.
As mentioned above, the main criterion for showing a site in search results is relevance of a web page to a user's search. By titling a page appropriately, including a brief description of the page in a meta-tag, and focusing the displayed content on a main subject or theme, the search engine will be clear on what the page is about and will list it when a user searches for that subject. If the topic of a page is unusual, the site will not be competing with many other sites and will consequently be shown high in the results when a user searches for that unusual topic.
Once, search engines relied on a hidden list of words and phrases called keywords that the coder put in a meta-tag to match against a user's search. But since the list was not displayed page content, words that owners put in the list did not necessarily correspond to the actual topic of the page, so they became useless to support searches. Today, meta-tag keywords are ignored or counted at the lowest possible priority by the major search engines. The value in creating a list of important words is as an exercise for the site's content editor to make sure that the subject of a page is represented in the page text by the words the user is likely to search on. Care paid to the topic or theme of a page as well as to the quality of content can enhance a page's search position.
It is generally thought that a search engine will attach greater importance, in determining the subject, to words it encounters first when reading a page; that is, words that appear high on the page; words in the "title" of the page; and words in section headings. And since search engines read text but not images, there is a benefit to showing the website's name and subject in text near the top of the page — perhaps over a background image, as on this page. This also implies that large headers or banners and Flash "splash pages" are not search engine friendly.
Since search engines read only text, they require either text links to get to other pages on a site or a site map file. Absent a site map, links written in Javascript, which may provide special behavior on click or mouseover, will prevent the search engine's crawler or spider from finding other pages on the site.
As websites proliferated, search engines (particularly Google) wanted to provide users not only with search results showing relevant pages but also pages on reliable and respected sites. The measure Google chose (called page rank) is determined by the number of in-bound links to a page from other respected sites (that is, sites that in turn have high numbers of inbound links from other respected sites).
A number of SEO subterfuges were invented to gain higher page rank, such as creating sites whose sole purpose is to sell or exchange links. Buying high numbers of links from link exchanges may get you to the top of search results temporarily but also increases the likelihood of getting banned from search results entirely — forever. It is avoided by most reputable sites.
On the other hand, it is worthwhile to try to persuade other reputable sites with related topics to provide links to your site. Over time, this will help you achieve better ranking.
We are cognizant of search-engine-friendly criteria when we design or redesign a site and when we review your new content. We can also review an existing site for problematic search-engine related issues, make suggestions for improving its search-engine-accessability, and advise you on acquiring in-bound links from respected sites.
"For years I would get about one call a year from my Rockland home improvement contracting business website. After your SEO work, my site is on the first page of Google search results, and I’ve been getting more calls." J. Pidgeon, Johnny Fix It
The basic criterion for inclusion in search listings is the relevance of the page content to the user's search.
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