Search Engines

Surveys show that 80% to 90% of surfers find what the are looking for using search engines, thus getting included in search engine results and having a good ranking is essential for getting found and receiving traffic. This is an important part of your marketing strategy and should not be overlooked. Some would say it is even more important than getting a good design, since a a nice looking website that nobody looks at is of no function for being a site.

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Why are search engines important? First, there is an tremendous amount of people surfing the internet using search engines as a starting point. Secondly, they are looking for something and if you can fufill what they are looking for, then they are the best traffic that you can get.


Preparation
Before you submit to search engines you have to make sure it is in a state fit for submission. If not, the impatience to submit quickly may actually do more harm than good. In short, search engine submission is a must - but only when you are ready. Rush to get your site ready, not rush to submit it.


Keywords

Every website is different, and even similar websites have different focuses. You need to identify what is your focus for your website, and what is your focus for each page in your site. After you have indentified them, these focuses must be sumarised into keywords. There are people searching for every kind of keyword, so you do not nessarily have to put your focus on the most popular keywords. For example, you may target a widely used keyword such as "Design". While there are more people searching for this word whether by itself or as part of a phrase, there are also more websites competing for the same keyword. A keyword like "Photoshop" may have less people searching, but it also narrows down the number of competitive sites for the keyword. You can even narrow down your focus to "Gradient Tool" or "Paint bucket", (which are tools in photoshop) to narrow down even more. Do not narrow down too much or you may end up with a keyword that nobody searches for.

Once you have settled down on your keywords, you can start to optimise on your website. You can optimise only the homepage, a specific page, or everypage. It is all up to you, how much time and energy you can put in it. You can also slowly optimise more and more pages as you work on your website and update it frequently.

Meta Tags

Not every search engine look at meta tags, but you should use them anyway, for those that do. The most important meta tag is your title. Preferably your keyword should be in your title. You should also know that different search engines analyse your submitted site (pages) differently and place different importance on different aspects. Also, different search engines have different limits, which is the number of words that they read before before they stop. This limit is to prevent people from dumping a whole encyclopedia of text onto the title. Well, people don't but you get the idea.

I would say a reasonable number limit of words is around 10 and 300 characters in both keywords and description meta tags. Another reason to limit your keywords is the focus. If you use 100 keywords, are they all relevant keywords?

Title Tag

The title of a page is the title. Too many people forget the meaning of the tag and sees it as just another meta. The title of a book should tell you what the book is about in brief, and in a short clear manner. The title and the description tag sometimes show up on the results page, so should be a properly worded sentence and not just some disjoint words. If it shows up as disjoint words on a search results listing, people are not likely to visit that link because it gives people the impression that it is 'search engine spam'. In the worst case, it could cause your site to be penalised, and when that happens your site gets wiped off the engine, so effectively no one will find your site using that search engine. Tread with care.

Content

Obviously, the content in your pages must match your keywords, title and description. Formulate your tags according to your content, not the other way round.

Link Popularity

Link Popularity is in short, 'how popular is the linked site'. How do search engines judge how good or how popular your website (or a page of your website) is? The answer is not how beneficial your content is. Remember that search engines are engines. They have no brains that function like a human. Search engines don't understand; they just see. Search engines go by the logic that a better site will have more websites linking to it. (Which is true by the way, so dont forget the common adage "content is king"). The more well-linked you are from other websites, the higher is your 'link popularity'. This is why many websites in the know will readily agree to a link exchange if you have good, real content. A link exchange is beneficial to both parties unless on of them is a spam site with no content but just pages and pages of words with no meaning. Bear in mind the such sites will get banned from any engines sooner or later, and it is not advisable to link to them. Also, such sites is highly probable to close down in a short time and if you do not remove the link in time, you will have a bad link (link to a non existing site). Bad links are a no-no because to the search engine, it only means that you have a badly maintained and probably outdated website.