Websites Search Engines Find: Make Marketable Sites

Market your website with effective search engine optimization and create user friendly sites. These ten tips will help your site get found.  The most beautiful site isn’t worth a hill of beans if it can’t be found. Need help implementing these steps? Get free email updates by subscribing to this site.

1. Your website address needs to be memorable and easy to type. Make it clear what your site is about. Search engines don’t give points for having your product in your URL, but it can help get it can make it easier for folks to recall the name of your site.
2. Use product names and keywords when building the files for your web site. Use hyphens instead of underscores in naming the files. (ie.www.widgetworld.org/green-widgets.html.) Why? Search engine robots sometimes read hyphens and under-scores differently plus you get keyword credit when using hyphens.
3. Content COUNTS! Make sure every web site and every page you build has  compelling text on each page. How much content? Opinions vary on the amount for the best site optimization,  but most agree it should never be less than 200 words of text and 10% of those should be important keywords.
4. See your site through the eyes of a search engine. Follow these rules in layout and design of a web site if you want the site to market well in the search engines:
   • Use more text content than html on the home page.
   • Avoid frames.
   • Minimize javascript. (No matter how cute that little applet might be, resist it!)
   • If posting ads make sure you attach no follow tags.
   • Make it clear what the site is about the minute it comes up on the visitor's screen.
   • Keep all files close to the root directory (search engines don’t like to crawl deep for info).
   • Do not use all caps for text.
5. Make sure each page title is seven words or less. Avoid stopper words (of, the, this, and, etc.) in titles. Give every page a unique title on the page matched to the meta tag title.
6. Use meta tags. Are meta tags dead?  Some search engines may ignore them this week, but next week that could change so put meta tags on each web site page.  It certainly won’t hurt a web page to have meta tags. Use meta tags correctly: keep the title tags less than 60 characters (punctuation and spaces count as characters); keep the description tags to 150 characters; and use no more than ten keyword phrases for keyword tags.
7. Make sure each page has at least one internal link to another page on your site and add external links that help the viewer understand the site better.
8. Use alt tags for each graphic so people surfing the net with graphics turned off or the handicapped can still understand your site because of well formulated alt tags containing key words.
9. Select a topic and stay with it. One topic is best, so if your site is about widgets use that as the theme and have pages about green, blue and titanium widgets. Do not try to sell widgets and coconuts on the same site — have two sites with single themes.
10. Include a link page on your web site. Try to have 20 links to your web site from other web sites before you go live on the internet. Make sure those other sites linking to you that have web site themes that are complementary to yours. A site about baby clothes with links to a night club, just doesn’t flow.

If you use these ten tips, your site will be much easier to find and have a greater potential for success.  The internet is constantly changing, so it’s important to stay on top of the latest research, and implement this knowledge. Subscribe to this site to stay informed.