Building a website that looks great and is fun to use can be a great project, but what most of us really want is to be attracting visitors to our site. Making a search engine friendly website is vital to achieving this.
Firstly, before discussing how to go about making your website search engine friendly, we need to try and provide a bit of basic information on how search engines work.
Each of the major search engines have some basic similarities. They all have a number of automated processes called spiders, which are used to crawl the web. What these processes basically do is to follow hyperlinks all over the internet and then, when they arrive at a new page, to record some details of that page.
At the end of any such crawl, the search engines are able to build up some information about your website and the type of content that it contains.
When an internet user then carries out a search using the search engine, this information is used to decide how well your website matches the search criteria. The better the search engine considers the match, the better your rank in the results.
Ensuring that your website is search engine friendly involves two main steps - the first is to get your site included in the search engine results and the second is to get the best possible rankings.
In order to make sure that your site is crawled, it's vital that you build a site structure that is easily accessible, both by search engine spiders and by real visitors to your site.
You should try and make sure that every page on your website can be accessed within 2 or 3 clicks from your home page. To help the spiders find all of your pages, you should also include a site map, with links to every page on your site.
There are numerous steps involved when it comes to improving rankings but some basics include making proper use of the TITLE, H1 and H2 tags. If you're not sure how these should be used correctly then take some time to look at the HTML standards.
Add good quality, unique content to your website and make sure that your site is regularly refreshed - in other words, add new content regularly.
Finally, look to link to sites that are relevant to your own and try to gain links from related websites.
If you follow these simple steps, you'll soon have a search engine friendly website.
About the Author
You can find out more about improving your web presence by visiting Search South, where Keith Barrett is employed as a search engine consultant. This article may be used by any website publisher, though this resource box must always be included in full.
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