How Do Search Engines Index Your Site

In order to understand how to better market your site, you must understand how the Search Engines index your site.

As defined by Wikipedia: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

Now the search engines send out spiders or webcrawlers to evaluate and index your site. The Algorithmic method mentioned above is constantly evolving and changing with the sophistication of the web. In order to stay in the game, you need to be aware of the bare basics required, and keep abreast of new marketing concepts as they evolve.

The basics or good practices in SEO are as follows:

Have a keyword or keyphrase in your URL. For example, if you search on “shop wine online” you will see that the 8th listing is wineshoponline.com which has all three of the keywords we searched on.

Put your top keyword / keyphrase in your title tag – your title tag doesn’t have to make sense to your visitor, that’s what the page content is for, the higher you rank a keyword, the closer to the beginning of your title tag it should be.

Make sure the same keyword / keyphrase is in the page content on your page, and make sure the content is relevant to the keyword or keyphrase.  Density or the number of times the actual word appears on the page is not important. What is important is that it is CLEAR that the page content is about the keyword.

Text links are crucial – to send the spiders onward to the rest of your site, you will need text links. Web Spiders can’t follow graphic links, so if all your links are graphic buttons, the spiders will have nowhere to go and will leave your site, possibly without indexing it properly. Highlight the keywords in your text and have them link to other parts of your site as well. E.G. if you are selling clothing and one of your keywords is T-shirts, have this link to the T-shirts page on your site.

Create a Description Meta Tag – The search engines will index this description as their summary data on the list. If you don’t have a description tag, the spiders will index whatever content it finds, and sometimes this can hurt you. A well written description will give the humans a proper idea of what they will find on your site, which will entice them to visit.

Although these practices alone will not get you listed high in the search engines, they are a general foundation of good practices to get you on the road there. So pay attention to what your web designer is doing and make sure these basics are in place when you start your Internet marketing campaigns.