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Small Business Information Center. Com |
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You need to "know" if
you want to grow."
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Search Engines: Designing for top placement Search engine design:
Things to consider in your designing for the search engines: Search engine optimization involves understanding the inner workings of the search engines. Many of the most popular search engines including AltaVista, Google, Hotbot and MSN use spiders to index pages. These spiders are small programs that rate web pages in terms of relevance to specific keyword phrases entered into a search inquiry. Relevance is established by considering several factors including title, placement of keywords, and meta tags within your HTML code. For example, it is absolutely imperative to give a descriptive title (about five words or so) to each page within your web site. Once you have submitted the URL for that page to a search engine, it will then send out a spider to crawl and index the changes to your web site. One of the reasons that designing for search engines is so important is that information that the spider returns with will be exactly what appears in the results page of the search engine listing. Search engines use different algorithms to index web pages in terms of relevance but every web page on your web site should include at a minimum:
Title tag: The title you choose will be the most important decision that you will make affecting your search engine ranking and listing. While there is no absolute science to it, you should probably take the first five or so descriptive words that come to mind when thinking of that specific web page and use that as your title. However, you almost need to consider it as a headline for an ad, so make it catchy. Text: Search engines vary their indexing procedure or algorithms when it comes to the text of your web pages. While many will index the entire page, others may take into account only the first 25 words (or 255 characters) of the submitted age (25/255 rule). So, you need to make sure to use your important keywords more than once in the first 25 words of your text. Another thing you might do is to create a transparent GIF image at the top of your web page that is one pixel in size with an ALT tag, that you can then insert a description of the page using the 25/255 rule. Meta tags: Meta tags are an indispensable tool in your desire for top search engine rankings. You need to include them along with the keywords relevant to each specific page on each of your web pages. We will discuss only the description and keyword tags on this page about the meta tags. A description meta tag is pretty much exactly as it sounds in that it gives a description of the web page for a search engine summary. The keyword meta tag is also exactly as it states, in that it lists keywords for the search engine to associate with that specific web page. Keywords should never be fewer than two words. These meta tags which go inside the header tags, are crucial to properly index your web pages with the search engines. They should reflect the content of the first couple sentences of the main body of text. It is important to remember that you make certain that the words you use in your keyword tags are the words that someone would type in to find your web page. If you don't insert Meta tags in each page, the search engine spider will only copy the first 25 words or 255 characters that it finds (25/255 rule). Some information provided by The Complete E-Commerce Book by Janice Reynolds Paul Susic MA Licensed Psychologist Ph.D. Candidate CEO/President Susic Psychological Consulting P.C.
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Optimum search
engine placement should always be the goal of your web site design. Your
small business web site needs to be designed in such a way that search
engine spiders can easily crawl your web site, otherwise you will miss
out on traffic that you would otherwise receive. If your web pages are
not listed within the first |
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