Now that you have a well-designed web site or web page, it’s time to supercharge it so that web surfers can find it quickly and easily. The process of getting your site ranked highly among the major search engines is called search engine optimization or SEO. It involves all of the steps you can take to ensure that your_website.com readily appears on as many search engines (i.e., Google, Yahoo!) as possible. Ideally, the goal is to have it fall on the first page of the most popular search engines when a user types in keywords related to what you do or who you are.

Meta tags

The first element in this process involves the meta tag, which is an element of HTML that often describes the contents of a web page and is placed near the beginning of the page’s source code. An HTML tag must appear in the head portion of the page. This is one of the most important factors in determining your placement in search engines. Most search engines use your title tag as the link text when listing sites on a page. The search engines use the mega tags to index pages by subject.

Make the meta tag title of each page short, concise, and descriptive. The title should include a list of the key words that relate somehow to the content of your site. Your list of keywords should be, in a sense, a prediction of what web surfers will enter as keywords in the search box of their favorite search engines.

Keep in mind, however, that your list of keywords must be just that. The keywords will do you no good if the words do not appear in the body of your web site. Go through your site carefully and pick out the words that define your site and what you want it to accomplish.

Meta tags may affect your site’s ranking, to a degree. The ranking refers to how high on the list your site appears when a user enters a given keyword into a search engine. The more popular your keyword, the more difficult it becomes to get a high rank. The more unique, obscure, or specific your keyword increases your odds of a high ranking. The trick is to have a good mix of both specific and broader keywords in your meta tags.

Body text

Probably more important than most meta tags in SEO is your site’s textual content. Search engines are becoming more sophisticated every day and rely on both meta tags and their use in your body copy.

Again, it is important that your keywords appear frequently in your site’s actual text. While we have preached the value of not flooding a web site with words (too much copy is cumbersome to visitors), too few words will also have a negative effect on the optimization. This is especially true on your home page. Be sure to choose your words carefully.

The crawlers sent out by search engines cannot read text that is coded in an image (jpeg, gif). The crawlers can only read HTML text. So if all your copy is in image format, which is often done for aesthetics, you are hurting your ranking.

Submitting to a search engine

Doing this means manually (in most cases) going to the search engine sites and letting them know that your web site is out there. Most search engines will ask for a brief description of your site along with its title and, of course, its URL.

Many search engines allow you to submit your site at no cost, but they also offer the option to pay for a faster review of your site. Yahoo!, for example, makes it mandatory for commercial websites to pay a fee to be considered. The main benefit of this “Express” service is that Yahoo! promises to review your site and show you your results within seven days. Remember, Yahoo! does not promise to rank your site well or even to list it at all. It’s a crapshoot. Also, results take time. Sometimes it takes weeks or more than a month after submitting your site.

Thinking like a search engine

As we’ve discussed, search engines are continually improving their ability to find and evaluate web pages. There was a time when a web author could “cheat” to get a better ranking using various tricks, such as overloading a page with hidden text that might be mistaken for actual content. For the most part, those days are over.

In fact, today these tricks can often hurt your chances and get you “blacklisted.” Many search engines (Google is the best example) use “crawlers” to add sites to their databases. Think of a crawler as a tiny program that travels unseen through the Internet, following its countless links, gathering information about the sites it visits along the way.

It is important to understand that crawlers follow and make note of links. If this is understood, then it becomes clear that perhaps the best way to get your site noticed by crawlers is to have plenty of outside links pointing in your direction.

Having other sites link to yours lends your website a degree of authenticity, and there are plenty of ways to get these links:

• Link exchanges are a fair, effective way to do this. It basically involves one web author negotiating with another: “I’ll link to your web page if you link to mine.”
• Getting yourself listed on trade-specific directories. This, however, may cost money.

   Be creative – use your site’s assets. There are plenty of sites out there that are thirsty to add quality web pages to their “links” sections. If you have an informative/appealing/entertaining/engaging website, you ought to find more than a few places that would like to associate with you.

Search engine optimization involves a huge variety of tactics; there is no one magic technique that will get you your desired results. It also takes time and trial-and-error. Be patient. Be persistent.

When you do finally get ranked, give yourself a nice pat on the back. There is an amazing sense of pride and accomplishment when you tap in your keyword on your search engine of choice and see your own site appear on page one.

(Editor’s Note: Andrew Holahan, graphic designer and Todd Kinniburgh, art director are with Graham Communications.)