Is Your Web Site Search Engine Friendly?

Make sure your web developer is analyzing and updating your web site to address any new indexing methods will help you maintain, or even improve, your search engine ranking.

(PRWEB) July 25, 2004 -- Top search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN have not indexed almost 88% of the web sites worldwide. Why is that? Because these web sites have not been optimized by their web designers.

Is this your web site? How can your business survive on the Internet if your own web site is not optimized for the search engines and will never be found?

If your web site is ranking poorly, your web designer might be using spamming tricks or gimmicks to try to fool the search engines. When you try to trick a search engine, you risk being banned from that search engine altogether.

Web sites that rank well on the search engines use honest optimization techniques that focus on key areas analyzed by the search engines, especially Text Content, META Tags and Links.

TEXT CONTENT
Text content on a web site should be interesting and informative to a web site visitor while providing keywords and key phrases that the search engine robot can index. When a search engine crawls your site, it looks for keywords and key phrases used throughout your website. The proper amount of keywords used on your web page and the weight those keywords have with the search engines help determine your keyword ranking.

Keep in mind that search engine crawlers are smart and, as they analyze your content, they can penalize you for "spamming" keywords on your website. The risk you take by trying to trick a search engine is never being indexed on that search engine at all.

META TAGS
META tags are hidden in the HTML code on your web site and are used by many search engines for indexing. Potential customers and clients type in certain words to find your web site in a search so those keywords and key phrases should also be in your META tags. Proper formatting of META tags on each web page can dramatically improve your search-engine ranking.

LINKS
Link popularity of a website is also rated by the search engines. This refers to how many quality web pages link to your site.

If you have a database-driven web site that is ranking poorly, one problem is that the search engine spiders aren't smart enough to figure out how to interact with your database. The pages of a database-driven web site are created from pieces pulled from a database. If an entire website is built using a database, the search engine crawler will leave the site without being able to index anything.

Web sites that are created entirely of Flash files tend to rank poorly on the search engines as well. Flash files are images that cannot be read by the search engine crawlers so, again, they will leave your web site without indexing your pages, making your web site basically invisible on the Internet.

The search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods constantly, meaning optimization techniques will change, requiring a great deal of continuous education for a web developer. If your web developer is using techniques that were popular two years ago, you will not achieve the results you need in today's Internet market.

If youre serious about your search engine ranking, you need to partner with a web developer who is experienced in the ever-changing trends of search engine optimization. Analyzing and updating your web site to address any new indexing methods will help you maintain, or even improve, your search engine ranking.

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