Search Engine Tips

Whether you are searching for that pet shop online, or the book store, or seek some obscure information you do it by using a search engine. This very fact is the reason why search engines are the mother of all traffic. Everybody starts their information gathering via the search engines. That is why to people who live and breath with the internet, search engines are critical and essential part of daily life.

Have you ever wondered how search engines rank the millions of websites they receive? They certainly do not just randomly display some pages. There is a criteria which search engines use to determine the position of a web page in the result.

Most major engines are general engines, and they generate millions of traffic each day. A study on the search engine results shows that most user's don't go pass the first 20 or 30 links presented. So if a website is not listed in the top 30, there is a very low chance that somebody visit it at all. This quest to achieve a top 30 listing out of 40 million webpages may seem impossible to the inexperienced webmaster but to beat the system, you have to know it first.

General search engines provide results depending upon the keyword searched. Some keywords obviously are more popular than the others. It is important to ensure that your website not only covers the most popular keywords, but also the less popular keyword as well. After all a less popular keyword is not as hotly contested and you stand a better chance of getting to the top of that particular keyword search. This does not mean you give up on the popular keywords, just means you have to spread your words a bit.

How you make your webpage can also greatly influence the position in the search engine. To know how to construct a search engine friendly webpage, you have to first know how search engine collects data from your page. What search engines commonly do is send a robot (called a spider), to crawl your page. This robot, checks the title, meta tag, content, crawls the links and then brings the information back to the search engine. These Spiders are very simple robots, they can't read images, scripts, flashes and such. If you page fully consists of flashes and has little content, search engines are most likly to think there is no content and totally ignore the page.The information gathered by the Spider is then stored into the search engine's database and indexed accordingly.

Let's start with a few search engine tips

Don't start your page with a script. These robots are very simple things and have trouble with scripts.

Try to avoid using frames for the webpage, as not all search engines support framed webpages. Even the ones that support them have a lot of have trouble with framed pages. Recommendation in this case is: if you absolutely have to have use framed page, make an unframed version to go with it.

Don't over use images, flashes and the like. They might look pretty and eye catching however these are extremely search engine UNfriendly. As we know, if a page mostly consists of images and flashes, the spider will think the page does not have any content and will just ignore it. There is also another disadvantage in over using images and flashes; it increases the load time for the page. Market survey shows if a page does not show signs of being loaded within 2 to 3 seconds, a surfer is going to look elsewhere.

Even with the images you have to use, try to use the alt tag. That way, some search engine might be able to read the text from it.

Use meta tags carefully, as the meta description plays a major part in whether your web page is present in the right fashion to potential customers. Even if you ranked high in the search engine, without the right meta description, nobody will want to click thru. You need it to be short, attractive and to the point.

Content rich web pages are the direction most search engines have been moving towards. Search engines will index pages higher if there is more content, and if it conforms to the title. Make sure the keyword you want to present in the page has appeared a number of times, but don't over use the keyword, as the search engine might think you are spamming and not list the page.

Have a consistent theme. You may consider spliting the themes into different domains. All pages that have a similar topic or theme in the same domain, seem to be indexed higher by search engines. So might be a good idea, if you have different products or services, to split the content and have each on different domain to maintain the consistent theme.

This is just a few search engine tips, might be useful to all your surfers wanting to create a page. If you still havn't had enough search engine tips, click on the link.