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There are many ways to make your website more searchable – and findable – by the search engines. Some of them are things that only your web designer can do, since they involve the actual coding, and some are things that you can accomplish very well on your own. Optimizing your website is something that only your web designer can do, but it is very important that you know about it
While many potential customers will arrive at your website by simply typing in your web address – www.YourBusiness.com – you also want to attract those people who don’t know the name of your business, and are using a search engine – such as Google or Yahoo – to look for places that sell or service the things that they need. In order for someone to find your website through a search engine, you must be indexed by the search engine, and rank high enough for your important key terms to appear in the search engine’s results pages. Search Engine Optimization – or SEO - is making sure that your website is optimized for the search engines to find you and rank you well.
Certainly the most important thing in SEO is that the search engines can find your website in the first place, and are able to read it in order to glean key terms from it. Search engines ‘read’ the source code for your website, since they aren’t able to actually see what is on the computer screen. Search engines can only read HTML code, which is a computer language used to design webspages. A website which uses HTML code - as opposed to another computer language - has hundreds of lines of computer code per page of a website. If you click on VIEW-SOURCE on the toolbar while a web page is opened, you will see what the search engines see, and if you are only seeing a few lines of code instead of several hundred lines per page, that is all that a search engine can see. There are many websites out there which are created using computer programs which render the source code unreadable by the search engines, including websites created by “easy to do” services which you – or even your web designer – may use instead of learning HTML coding. In fact, the majority of clients who come to me for a website evaluation previously had these unreadable websites –all I had to do was to click on VIEW-SOURCE to see that they weren’t properly optimized for the search engines.
Along with a website being coded in standardized HTML, there are many opportunities for the addition of “meta tags” and keywords on each web page – a perfect spot for terms and phrases that your potential customers would type into a search engine to find your business. Meta tags are words added to the 'back end' of a website - your visitors don't see them, but the search engines do. The more times these keywords are used on each webpage – both in your content (assuming that your website is coded with standard HTML, and not created with Shockwave or some other template program), as well as in your meta tags ‘behind the scenes’, the better your website will rank, especially on Yahoo and MSN search engines. All websites created by Red Penguin include meta tags and keywords – simply supply us with a list of relevant terms and phrases, and they will be integrated into your website.
You can simply wait patiently for a search engine to accidentally stumble upon your website, or you can invite them in for a look, getting your site indexed quickly. The best ways to accomplish this are by submitting your URL to the major search engines, following specific instructions set forth by the search engines for optimal placement, and linking to your website from another website which has already been indexed. All websites created by Red Penguin Web Solutions are submitted to over 20 search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN. Also, an XML sitemap (this is an extra page of pure computer code in yet another language - XML) is created specifically for your website and uploaded to your web servers, which is the procedure that Google has requested for optimal placement. Additionally, links to your website are placed on other websites which have already been indexed by the search engines, making it easier for the search engine ‘robots’ to follow links directly to your site.
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