How to get prospects to find you using the Internet: 4 keys to creating a search engine friendly site

By: Rodney Goldston

Many people believe that getting listed in a major search engine like Yahoo!, Google, or MSN is almost as good as getting your business mentioned on the Oprah show. Not quite. You see, getting listed in a search engine, even a major search engine, won't accomplish much unless you get placed in the top few listings on a number of specific keywords that you target.

In this next series of articles entitled 'How to get prospects to find you using the Internet', I'll teach you everything you need for economical search engine optimization, getting found in your town (local search engine positioning), and offer a bunch of tips for the Google search engine, Yahoo search, and other small business web site search engine positioning.

In this article I will teach you 4 keys to creating a search engine friendly site. Let's get started.

Rule #1: Give visitors the information they're looking for

The single most important thing is to provide high-quality content on your pages, especially your homepage. Pages with useful content will attract many visitors and entice webmasters to link to your site. In creating a helpful, information-rich site, write pages that clearly and accurately describe your topic. Think about the words users would type to find your pages and include those words on your site.

Rule #2: Make sure that other sites link to yours

Links help crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in search results. When returning results for a search, search engines combine PageRank (their view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Search engines count the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."

Don't fall for page linking scams. Only natural links are useful for the indexing and ranking of your site. All the major search engines have algorithms that can distinguish natural links from unnatural links. Natural links to your site develop as part of the dynamic nature of the web when other sites find your content valuable and think it would be helpful for their visitors. Unnatural links, such as doorway pages, to your site are placed there specifically to make your site look more popular to search engines.

Rule #3: Make your site easily accessible

Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link. Static links are URL's that do not contain special characters, such as www.AskBigPapa.com . URLs that contain "?" are called dynamic URLs. Dynamic URLs are created by server-side scripting languages, such as php, asp, jsp, perl, and cgi. The portion of the URL appearing after "?" is the page's query string parameter and is the part of the URL that changes.

Even if your web site depends on dynamic links you may be able to create static copies of dynamic pages. If you create static copies, don't forget to add your dynamic pages to your robots.txt file to prevent search engines from treating them as duplicates.

Rule #4: Things to Avoid

Don't try and fool search engines by filling your page with lists of keywords, attempting to "cloak" pages, or putting up "crawler only" pages. If your site contains pages, links, or text that you don't intend visitors to see, the major search engines consider those links and pages deceptive and may ignore your site. Many people believe that getting listed in a major search engine like Yahoo!, Google, or MSN is almost as good as getting your business mentioned on the Oprah show. Not quite. You see, getting listed in a search engine, even a major search engine, won't do squat unless you get placed in the top few listings on a number of specific keywords that you target.

Avoid search engine optimization companies that claim to “guarantee” high ranking for your site in search results. Honest search engine optimization firms can improve your site's flow and content, but beware of others who may employ deceptive tactics in an attempt to fool search engines. Be careful; if your domain is affiliated with one of these deceptive services, it could end up banned.

The best advice I can give you is to keep your web site simple. Many web sites are loaded with images. Don't use images to display important names, content, or links. Crawlers do not recognize text contained in graphics. Use ALT attributes if the main content and keywords on your page can't be formatted in regular HTML.

Don't create multiple copies of a page under different URLs. Many sites offer text-only or printer-friendly versions of pages that contain the same content as the corresponding graphic-rich pages. To ensure that your preferred page is included in search results, you'll need to block duplicates from search engine spiders using a robots.txt file. I've posted an article in the Google section of my site, www.AskBigPapa.com, that will teach you how to block various Google user agents.