For more information contact Professor Dan Remenyi at dan.remenyi@mcil.co.uk

Pick Your Strategic Keywords

Internet surfers usually search for Websites by typing keywords into the search box in search engines. The words that you imagine users entering to search for your site are your strategic keywords. Your strategic keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Usually, too many sites will be relevant for a single word.

Position Your Keywords

Make sure your strategic keywords appear in the crucial locations on your web pages. The page title is most important. Failure to put strategic keywords in the page title means a perfectly relevant web page may be poorly ranked.

Use your strategic keywords for your page headline, if possible. Have them also appear in the first paragraphs of your web page.

Consider the implications of web design

Many web designers use tables to layout text and imagery when formatting their web pages. When a search engine reads a page it breaks tables apart. Therefore using a table may make your page seem less relevant as it pushes your text further down the page.

Large sections of JavaScript can also have the same affect as tables. As with tables, the use of meta tags can also help.

Use Meta Tags

Meta tags are not a magic solution to ensuring web sites are highly ranked by search engines. Not all search engines support Meta tags. However they can improve a site’s ranking with a number of search engines and therefore are invaluable to making a site more findable. By definition Meta tags are machine understandable information for the Web. Generally it is information used to define and document the content of a site. It doesn’t appear when the page is viewed through a browser, but sits silently in the HEAD element of a page adding commentary for whoever or whatever (essentially search engine robots) cares to look at it. Some search engines make use of two types of Meta tags, keywords and description tags. The description tag returns a description of the page in place of the summary a search engine would normally generate. The keywords tag provides keywords that the search engine can associate with your page.

Many web designers over rate the importance of Meta tags to search engine performance. HotBot and Infoseek do give a slight boost to pages with keywords in their Meta tags, but Lycos doesn’t read them at all, and there are plenty of examples where pages without Meta tags still get highly ranked. 

Have Relevant Content

Keywords need to be reflected in the page’s content. In particular, that means you need HTML text, that the search engines can read on your page.

Use HTML text when possible

Sometimes sites present large sections of copy via graphics. Search engines can’t read those graphics. Therefore they miss out on text that might make your site more relevant. Some of the search engines will index ALT text and comment information, along with Meta tags. But to be safe, use HTML text whenever possible.

Have HTML links

Some search engines are unable to follow image map links from the home page to inside pages. However the most relevant, descriptive pages may be inside pages rather than the homepage. Therefore HTML hyperlinks should be added to the homepage that lead to major inside pages of the Website.

A site map page with text links will help search engines locate pages within your Website.

Link your pages well internally. This will enable search engines to find more of your Website.

Some of the major search engines cannot follow frame links. Provide an alternative method for them to enter and index your site, through using Meta tags or smart design.

Avoid Dynamic Doorblocks

Common Gateway Interface (CGI) code is a standard for running external programs from a World Wide Web HTTP server. For example a CGI program could enable a site to access information in a database and format the results as HTML. Some search engines may not be able to index pages generated using CGI or database-delivery and this should be taken into consideration.

Avoid symbols in your URLs, especially the ? symbol. Search engines tend to choke on it.

Submit Your Key Pages

Submit the two or three pages that best summarise your web site. This gives the search engine alternative pages to begin crawling your site from if it has difficulty reaching one of the pages. This will ensure the search engine finds all of the pages in the site using the links. Submit your pages manually so that you can see if there are any reported problems.

Be patient. It can take up to two months for non-submitted pages to appear on search engine results.

Verify And Maintain Your Listing

It is important to continuously check your sites performance in all of the search engines. Check on your pages and their listing regularly.

Some major search engines are now providing country-specific versions of their search engines. These filter sites by domain. If this applies to your site contact the search engine so they can manually include you site.

Resubmit your site any time you make significant changes.

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