INL - News

For the last two years I have been successfully operating several web sites. I was fortunate in that I developed a process to get the sites listed in the search engines very quickly. I have been able to use this same method to get a few select keywords to rank very high, which allows the rest of the site enjoy the buoyancy effect of having a high ranking keyword. In the event you have not heard of the buoyancy effect, it is the concept that one or two keywords ranking well will lift the rest of the site in the search engine rankings.

I like to review a handful of concepts with the design team before we launch a new site. I like to start by checking for H1 and H2 tags being used throughout the main pages of the web site. Search engine spiders are quick to notice and crawl text in these tags, so they are important in helping the spiders to understand the theme of the site. With good content and the right tags to support them, the site will quickly be crawled by the spiders, the theme will be correctly derived and the search engines can start sending traffic to the site when people request information using the keywords.

Anchor text pointing to other key pages on the site is another area I will check. I am typically able to help web sites get a boost in the search engines by reviewing images and moving the text in the images out into the web page itself. Text contained in an image is not able to be read by the search engines so the site is missing out on the spider being able to read the text inside of the image. The best solution I tend to use is to reduce the size of the image and attractively position the text around the image in a manner that does not destroy the aesthetic appeal of the original image.

I always like to have a unique page for each main keyword of the site so it can highlighted appropriately. Search engines always like to be able to go to a page where the name of the page is the same as the keyword, it gives it an intrinsic value. An example is that of wedding flowers where the home page would contain wedding flowers in anchor text and point to a unique page with the title and html name of wedding flowers. With this convention in place, the search engines will know exactly what to do and will reward the site with the right theme and keyword indexing.

The next item I look for is the use of dashes and not underscores. I have heard, seen and witnessed countless examples of pages not being indexed as well because of the use of underscores. I cannot explain why (I do not know) but I know that this is an issue and should be avoided. Two pages called almost the same name, wedding-photographer.htm and wedding_photographer.htm , will not score equally in the search engines, all else remaining equal. It has been proven time and again so please stay away from it.

Do you want to know what the search engines think the theme of your site is? The absolute best way to do review this information is to use the Google Keyword Tool (type that phrase into a search engine). You will be treated with what the search engine believes your site is about when you look at the terms it returns. Many clients of mine are surprised to learn that the search engines do not think the site is even remotely close to what they intended and we go through a process of fixing the view from the search engine’s perspective. We do that mostly by putting simple no follow terms into the links and by highlighting keywords with H1 and H2 tags. The situation can quickly be turned around so please do not worry if your site is not what you think.