On Search Engines and Search Engine Optimization

Now that you have completed your website, it is time to get it listed with the search engines. If you believe that all you need to do is build a website and people will just come and see it, then you are a dreamer It takes time, attention, a lot of patience and sometimes a little money to market and promote your website efficiently. I hope that the following tips will help you succeed in building traffic to your website.
At this point I would like to make a clear distinction between crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories, which are often mixed up. As to the directories, you don't really need to care about the position of your site in their search results -- human visitors hardly ever search there. But to be listed in their index is vital. Getting listed with them helps crawler-based search engines locate your site and perhaps helps it rank better, because of the link importance these sites provide to you. For example, Google's catalog is nothing else than a copy of the Open Directory Project (DMOZ) catalogue. Hence, it is extremely important to be listed with DMOZ to get your site into the Google's search results. Several years ago the industry was dominated by so-called "words-on-the-page" ranking system, which meant that the more times a word was repeated on the page, the higher rank the page got. The major crawler-based search engines ranked pages based on where and how often search terms appeared on them. Now Google and company give more weight to pages which come from sites with similar content. That is why getting listed with directories helps search engines better define the topic of your website. The most important directories are Open Directory (DMOZ), LookSmart and Yahoo!. Getting a website listed in DMOZ can be very frustrating. We know that being listed will probably help our Google ranking, but getting in can take a very long time. Every website and page that is added to the directory has to be manually reviewed before it is included. DMOZ reported employing more than 60 thousand volunteer editors at the time of writing this article, but this number is misleading -- that is the total number of editors they have had since the project started. They don't in fact have that many editors, nor anywhere near that many. But the company is growing and expanding its services. Now they report searching more than 4 million sites and have recently introduced new service, called Thumbshots, which allows previewing links before clicking. Yahoo! charges USD 299.00 for express inclusion to the directory within 7 days, otherwise you will have to wait from 2 to 8 weeks. In my opinion, it isn't worth paying $299 to get into directory -- you can get into Yahoo! for free through Google, since it is powered by Google. Optimize for Google, and you are optimizing for Yahoo!. This situation is likely to change after Yahoo! purchased Inktomi last year and announced the plan to develop it and use it as the main powering engine. As for LookSmart, the company is losing its position at a high rate. After LookSmart had lost its largest search portal customer MSN, two more companies -- Inktomi and Sprinks declared that they would not renew their agreements with the company to use its search listings.

As to crawler-, or spider-based search engines, the situation there is getting more and more complicated. Search engines constantly change their algorithms and there are thousands of hackers worldwide who track these changes and publish them.
Still, there are some general rules, observing which you can reach real success without changing the content of your site constantly and tracking the latest algorithm changes. But first let's have a look at what search engines "want" to see at your pages. The first rule of the thumb: Internet is a textual environment, so the first thing you must care about is content. Yes, surely, nice graphic design is very important, flash is just cool, but only for human visitors. Search engines don't "see" the design and you somehow need to make search engines "like" your site so that they could drive people to it. You need to compromise. Most search engines cannot scan Flash objects, so you either need to get rid of site navigation implemented in Flash, or to duplicate it with plain HTML. Although, some search engines, AllTheWeb being the first, declare that now they can find links in Flash. Still, it is always better to be on the safe side. And moreover, Flash does not provide any textual content, which is vital for estimating the relevancy of the page.

So how to optimize your pages so that search engines would "like" them? Several issues arise in this context. The first one is that webmasters are often at loss: are keywords per page or per site thing? The answer is obvious. Since it sometimes may be difficult to tell what the topic of the site is, especially if it touches many topics, the keywords should definitely be selected on per page basis. I have seen hundreds of pages containing heaps of keywords in their meta-tags, in hope that they would get a high rank by those keywords. This is a complete nonsense. Meta Keyword tag has almost completely lost its importance in respect of positioning. For example, Google doesn't support it at all, although Inktomi (which powers MSN and will be used by Yahoo! soon), Teoma and some other engines do. But to get a high ranking you need to put these keywords in the actual text of the page. Moreover, only one search term per page is preferable, although two is also not so bad.

The next thing is: how to choose appropriate keywords? Be careful, because if you initially choose wrong keywords or words no one is likely to search for, your efforts will go down the drain. There are few online services and programs, which can help you to compile a list of keywords for your site. For example, Overture's Inventory (inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/) is a service, using which you can find the most popular words related to your keyword. Word Tracker (WordTracker.com) offers a similar service, but unlike Overture, it is a paid one. Also, you can use the software package NetPromoter (www.Net-Promoter.com), which finds sites, which are similar to your site, but rank higher, scans their pages and their meta-tags and extracts related keywords. In addition, you can use an ordinary thesaurus. It would be definitely ridiculous to try to compete for some generic words, like "computers", "software", "programs" if you sell computers or software through your site, because the competition is too severe. Try to be specific. Go regional if you sell your products in a specific area. You have much more chances to rank higher if you choose to compete for "computers in Ohio", than just for "computers".

Keyword density is another thing that must be taken into consideration when writing a page. It is a percentage measure of how many times a keyword is repeated within the text of the page. For example, if a page contains 100 words and ten of these words are "computer", then "computer" is said to have a 10% keyword density. There are programs that will rate keyword density by singular words or by groups of words, like "new computers in Ohio". Normal percentage of keywords for a single page is about 2-6 %. This is the keyword repetition percentage in normal speech. Some experts even say that the normal volume can be up to 16 per cent, but I have never seen pages with so high keyword density. Actually, I think such page would look more like Search Engine spam. This article is dedicated to search engine optimization -- take a pencil and count the number of repetitions of this phrase on the page. You won't get outside 2-6 percent for these words. By the way, for finding out the keyword density on the pages of your site you can use any of numerous online services and programs, like Keyword Density.com (www.keyworddensity.com/) -- a free online service, Ranks.nl (www.ranks.nl/), GRKda (www.grsoftware.net/search_engines/software/grkda.html) and some others.

After choosing the keywords, you need to place them correctly. There is an order of importance for the structural elements on a page. How you build your content from top to bottom is critical when writing a copy for the web. Search engines try to deliver the information most relevant to your request, so the principles here are the following. People typically scan information when they perform searches. Elements that are bolded, in a different color, set off by bulleted or numbered lists, are usually the things that we see first. This is important, if visitors don't see the terms they are looking for, they then move on to other websites to find the information that they are scanning for. This also works for the search engines. Google gives much weight to words placed in link texts, Title tag, bolded text and alt texts to images. Make sure there are keywords at the beginning of the page. Placed there, especially in header tags H they will be considered words, introducing the content of the page, hence more important than ordinary text.

There are so-called on-page and off-page factors that influence page importance. Among off-page factors, links are the most important. Search engines like Google attribute link text to the target page; they treat it as an important element of the target page. Much has been said about link popularity for Google. Last year American bloggers tried a trick, which was later called "Google Bomb". They placed links, containing phrase "miserable failure" and pointing to the official White House biography of George W. Bush on their pages, which caused the biography of the US president to be No. 1 by the query "miserable failure". The idea became so popular soon that the first four positions are now occupied by George Bush, Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore, and Hillary Clinton. Make sure that each page contains at least one outgoing link, since pages with no links are called "dangling pages", and these are the things you should avoid.


Probably, the most important on-page element is the Title tag. The text from this tag is displayed as the title of the page in search results. Make sure that the page's search term is included in this tag. There is nothing wrong in repeating it twice, just make sure it reads well. Think of newspaper headlines. With a few words, they make you want to read a story. It goes without saying that each page's Title tag should be different from the Title tags on the site's other pages.

I have already mentioned header tags. The main problem about their usage is their size. For example, H1 tag may look quite imposing against the other elements on the page. But it is easily controlled by Cascading Style Sheets -- you can control both the size and the font. You can even try a little trick on search engines -- define the font color of these headers to match the background color, the latter one being composed of monochromatic images. This may actually work on any elements of the page. But don't try submitting such pages to directories -- people have more chances of noticing fraud than search robots.

There are several programs, which may help you analyze and optimize your pages for search engines. The abovementioned NetPromoter (www.Net-Promoter.com) has a module, called Page Analyzer -- a utility, which analyzes your pages either by Google criteria or general search engines criteria, also analyzing keyword density. Also, the program most popular in the USA, Web Position Gold (www.WebPosition.com), contains Page Critic module, which does approximately the same. AddWeb (addweb.com/) is another popular program for search engine optimization and submission, which has recently released its latest version. Surely, experienced webmasters can easily do without these programs, but for a novice they would be of great help, especially for understanding the indexing processes and tracking ranking changes. Search engine software is also suitable for larger companies that manage many websites and wish to maintain an in-house marketing team. An individual or group can be trained in the use of the software and the basic skills involved in search engine marketing. Also it may be good for small or medium business that cannot afford to employ quality SEO personnel. A good SEO campaign will actually cost you nothing in the long run because it will amount to increased exposure and increased traffic, which in turn, will bring an increase in revenues.