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by: Eric Friese
So you've designed this great web site that will solve all over your companies goals and make your wildest dreams come true. So how do you get people to come to it? Search engine optimization is one of the largest hurdles that developers must jump over to create a successful web site. Every aspect of a web site ties into to how the search engines interpret and index your site. Make one wrong step and you may spend the rest of your time trying to bring your page rank back up.
For those of you who are new to search engine optimization, I'll explain how the search engines find your site. For those of you who have been around, you can skip on to the next section. Search engines find your site in one of two ways: either you submit the site to the search engine for indexing or their spiders find your site from a link on another site. The spider will walk through all of the pages on your site and grab the text and images. Then the search engine categorize your site according to the content on your page.
The first think a spider sees when it comes to your site is the Title and your Meta tags. If you do not designate a title or your meta tags you are setting yourself up for failure. The title tag is used to designate what your page is about. Many people use keywords in their title to help with search engine ranking. An example would "ABC Realty - Providing Real Estate to the Atlanta , GA area." The name of the company is ABC Realty, their business is real estate, and they operate in the Atlanta area. Meta tags were created for the sheer purpose of letting visitors know what your site is about. There is a wide array of meta tags, but the main ones to make sure you have are keywords and description
Any designer that has been in the game for awhile remembers when the cool thing to do was to have a crazy navigation menu with the newest technology. While this may seem interesting to some folks, search engines do not find them too impressing. Complicated menus written in DHTML or Flash can "confuse" spiders and instead of going through the navigation to the next page they will simply not index your site. Is having a cool menu worth not getting indexed? To combat this, keep your links in text. A good designer can create a great site and still use simple text links for navigation.
Ever been to a site that has a script or crazy font? Chances are that the text is not actually text; it's a picture of text. One of the drawbacks of web design is that we are restricted to a certain set of fonts that are standard across most computers. To get a more creative look, some will write their text in a graphic design program and then put the picture in to the web site. What's the problem? Search engines use the text on your site to categorize your sit. If the text is picture, the spider will not be able to read it. This also goes for text in Flash. The best practice is to keep text and links in text form and resist the urge to use an image.
When designing your site, make a list of the keywords that you want to focus on. In the case of keywords, less is usually better. It is better to have ten keywords instead of fifty because the spiders will have a hard time categorized your site. Let's say that your site is about apples. It should be your goal to mention the word apple as many times throughout your site; without making it too obvious. When the spider comes to your site, it will see the word apple many times and categorize your site about apples.
While these tips are just the tip of the iceberg, they are a great foundation for making your site search engine friendly. Watch out for Search Engine Techniques Part II for more detailed techniques that will help you get to that first results page.
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