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Search Engines - Part I: Get Listed

With so many pages on the Internet, the best way to get traffic to your site is to get listed favourably on as many of the large search engines as possible.

How search engines work

Most search engines require you to tell them about your website. You give them the address of your home page and they will dutifully retrieve it and index it. They then look at all of the links on the page and index each of those pages as well.

During "indexing" modern search engines will look at all of the text on a page to decide what your site is about. The most important part is usually the title of the page and the first paragraph. Some search engines also take the META keywords tag and use that (although this is becoming less common as the keywords can be abused).

When a search engine displays a link to your site it will usually include an extract from the page itself as well. If your site uses frames, don't have the first paragraph on the page containing the frameset as "Sorry, your browser doesn't support frames". That is the extract that will be displayed. Ideally you shouldn't submit the frames page - you'll usually have a "main" page inside the frameset. Submit that as your starting point. This brings problems with it, however these can be overcome with some scriping code (I'll cover this in the next article).

Getting a good listing

How NOT to do it

Since the dawn of time (well, search engines at least), web sites have tried to get higher listings in some very underhanded ways. You may be thinking about using the same techniques - I'm going to tell you the consequences.

Using Irrelevant Keywords
This technique involves including keywords in the META tag which are not related to the page itself. This is the reason why many search engines have stopped looking at the META tags altogether - although some still do (but some are smart enough to realise which keywords are irrelevant).

Repeating Keywords
As it's name would suggest, this is where the same keyword is repeated in the keywords META tag. This doesn't work any more - repeated keywords are ignored. And if you repeat the word too many times, your site is removed from the index completely.

Using Hidden Text
It is entirely possible to set the text colour on a page to the same colour as the background colour (making it invisible). This is used to fool the search engines into thinking there is additional (irrelevant) content on the page. The search engines are smart enough to ignore this as well.

Using Competitors Names
A common technique used to involve putting your competitors names and products into your keywords, so that your site got listed before theirs. This is likely to land you in court and is not a good idea.

The right way to do it...

There are many ways of getting high listings without resorting to the above tactics.

Using the Title Correctly
A descriptive title is very important - try to include keywords in the title of page as well as the actual title of the article.

Setting Keywords
The META tag can be used to assign keywords to your pages. Although some search engines now ignore these, the clever ones still read them because they can spot when they are being abused. Make sure that the keywords are relevant to the page.

eg <meta name="Keywords" value="keyword 1, keyword 2">

Setting a Description
A META tag can also be used to set a description for the page. This is used instead of the first paragraph of text by some search engines, so keep it short, sweet and descriptive.

eg <meta name="Description" value="A short, sweet description of the page">

Good Journalistic Practice
Any good journalist will summarise the story they are writing about in the first paragraph. Try to do this with your pages - the words in the first paragraph are the most important.

Lots of Links
Search engines like Google will increase your ranking if lots of other sites link to you, and if they have nice things to say about you. This sort of contextual indexing means that you should try and get your URL on as many sites as possible.