Website Development
Search Engines And Your Website
by:
John K Mitchell
You've
built a great website for your business and are waiting for the
visitors to come. Your return on investment research shows that if you
get X number of visitors to your site this will lead to Y new clients
or sales. You put the garage on standby to deliver your dream car.
You
wait and wait and wait…. Some visitors do come to your site but only
in small numbers. The feedback is positive from everyone who does
visit, the visitors to sales ratio figures are in line with the
forecasts but the volume of visitors you need to hit your sales
targets remains elusive. Why?
Your
designers have put in a lot of effort. The site looks good and is easy
to navigate, but is it search engine friendly? Can you be found in the
major search engines?
Up to
78% of all website activity in the UK comes from the search engine
Google, and over 98% of people give up after the first 3 pages of
results, so you should check to see if you're listed on the first 3
pages of this engine and with over 8 billion pages in Google at
present, the competition can be fierce.
One of
the things to check include the images on the site. They all have
'alt' values, don't they? Check by hovering the mouse over the
picture, is a description displayed? Search engines cannot read
images, they rely on the ‘alt’ value to tell them what the picture is
about. Likewise Flash movies and Frames are difficult for the search
engines to read. This would also make your website accessible to many
more human visitors (including those that have images turned off and
those that use talking browsers).
Is the
wording 'search engine friendly'? Do you even mention the words that
people would use to search for your site on the web page? How will the
search engines know that your site is about widgets if the page
doesn't say so? When thinking about the wording bear in mind that you
may be trying to attract visitors with a wide range of knowledge about
your product, from those that know that they are looking for widgets
to those people that know that they want a blue, 18mm, left handed
thread, widget. Does your site cater for all these visitors ?
All
these things can be built into the site given time & experience but
you need to know what you are doing - its not just a case of adding
'Meta tags', the majority of search engines pay no attention to these
tags nowadays.
Of
course, if you feel brave and can spare the time from running your
business you can learn the current rules and hope that they do not
change. Alternatively, you could use a professional search engine
positioning company like Hiperactive.Net (http://www.hiperactive.net)
to get your site to the top of the search engines.
by-http://www.forestsoftware.co.uk
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