Create, Capture, Convert

Small Business SEO 4: How To Make Your Website Search Engine Friendly

If you are at all interested in having your website be found by people online, you need to devote some time and attention to optimizing your site for the search engines. There are five main on-page elements that your site needs in order to be search friendly: Indexable Content, Crawlable Link Structures, Targeted Keywords, Title Tags and Meta Tag Descriptions.

Indexable Content

If you have decided to have a website designed that includes lots of Flash, Java code, images, video, etc. One of the drawbacks to having this type of content dominate the site is that the search engines simply can’t read what’s going on. To the human eye, this stuff looks great, but it literally makes your site’s content invisible to search spiders. Therefore, to correct this, you need to add a significant amount of HTML friendly content that is able to be deciphered.

Crawlable Link Structures

When the search spiders come to your online neighborhood and spot your site, they will latch onto the index page and crawl its content. This is a necessary step that allows your content to be scooped up and added into the search index database. Once it is done crawling that page, it will seek out links on the page that lead to other pages. A link is like leaving a door open for the spider to enter and explore the next room.

This is why it’s very important that you make sure that your site has a properly set up link structure that makes it easy for spiders to find all of the pages on your site. If there is no page link available, the spider will not be able to crawl additional pages.

Targeted Keywords

While site content should be friendly and easy-to-read for your site visitors, another thing it must contain that is important to search are keywords. Keywords are a combination of word phrases that the typical online web surfer uses to find information of high interest. You need to conduct some research into what types of keywords your potential customers are regularly using and make a list.

After you have gathered up your list of targeted keywords, you want to have them inserted seamlessly into the pages of your website. This can be done by a skilled website content writer that is familiar with SEO keyword copy. One thing to be aware of is that you don’t want your keywords to be too general. For instance, someone searching for blue copy paper is looking for a very specific type of paper. If you sell paper and do not include this long-tail keyword, but stick with the general term “paper,” your site will not attract the most optimal customers for your business.

Title Tags

Every page of your site should include a strong title tag that explains to visitors (and search engines) exactly what your page content is about. Title tags normally appear at the very top of an Internet browser, regardless of which browser is used. These tags show up in search results, so wording is important. Keywords can enhance title tags and should always be added at the front for best results.  Keeping this all in mind you still want people to click your link, so make you title tags interesting to the searcher so that they visit your site instead of your competitors.

Meta Tag Descriptions

Meta tag descriptions are not used to assist a site’s ranking in search engines. However, they do play an important role in search listings. The content includes a brief description of your website and can be useful for enticing people to visit your website. When someone does a search, they will usually read your Title Tag and Meta Description first.