One of the most frequent questions small business owners ask me is: now that I have constructed my internet page , how do I find it on the search engines?
Actually, having your web site indexed by a search engine is not that difficult. However, generating a high rank and to appear on the first page of results - is.
Lets start with a brief explanation of how a search engine works and how the process begins:
Search engines store billions of pages in an archive called index. When a search engine conducts a search, it doesnt really search the web: it searches the index. Search engines add web pages to their index through the work of a "search bot", a powerful software script that "crawls" the web regularly, following links and adding to the index all the pages it finds.
The first step would be to register your web page/ pages with the search engine providers. At the same time, some specific programming code has to be entered into each page of the website to allow the search bot to recognise it and to crawl around it, indexing all that it finds.
Once this process is complete, a user entering words into a search engine that are specific to your company or website, may be able to find you... It doesn't mean that they will find you, but it now means that they have the posibility to find you..Think of it like the yellow pages, this first step of search engine registration is like paying yellow pages to have your company listed in the book..the user can then pick up the book and browse over all the companies like yours in the book and choose the one they want to use. Unfortunately they may have overlooked your companies listing.. there may have been so many pages and companies to choose from in the book. Or maybe your listing could be buried deep inside the book, with much more frequent, bolder listings grabbing the attention.. in short, that is search engines.
To sum up - you have to be in it..to stand a chance of being found.
Now, lets suppose that your page is in the search engine index..How do you improve it's visibility. The different attempts to answer that question have given birth to a whole new discipline called Search Engine Optimization. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves following a series of techniques to increase the relevance of your page for certain search terms or keywords.
You must decide in advance what are the keywords you believe a user will type in the search engine window to find your page. This is probably the most important step in search engine optimization: if you pick keywords that nobody uses, or, to the contrary, keywords that are too common (too competitive), your page will never be found.
The keywords you chose must be used fairly often in different parts of your page, like the title , headings, sub-headings, and your page copy. The more your keywords appear on your page (without "over-stuffing" your page copy with them), the more relevant your page will be to a search engines ranking for your selected keywords.
Now, you may be thinking that this SEO thing is too user friendly: you could just manipulate a few page elements and you would be all set. The search engines, however, are smarter than that. To avoid this kind of potential abuse, search engines rely heavily on links from other pages. In a nutshell, the more links to your page from quality pages with content related to your site you might get, the higher your page will rank. In other words, you might have a dazzling page, but if nobody is linking to it, you will not achieve high search engine rankings.
Thats it.
In summary: chose the right keywords, use them often on your page, and get as many links as you may from quality pages related to your sites content, and you will be on your way to high search engine rankings. The rest is just instance and patience.
• Is being found by search engine users important to you?
• If so, what particular search phrases do you envisage targeting, on which particular search engines?
• Do you have a budget specifically for promoting your website?
Contact CHAM | DESIGN for more information
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