Free Website, Printing and Graphic Design Tips

Here are a couple of hint to help you make your website even more “crawlable” by the search engines. Why? Because it’s the key to better search engine return ranking. You want people to find your site!
1. Spiders like html and lots of content related text. Keep the Flash but don’t go all Flash and use alt tags on your pictures. Make sure you have enough html and content related text to keep the spiders happy.
2. Include a sitemap in your website. Spiders love a good sitemap and ifyou’re not sure how to set it up, Google will give you all the help you need. Take a look at their Webmaster Tools.
3. Update you site. Putting up a website and never updating it is the wrong approach. The spiders want to crawl new stuff and your visitors want new reasons to return. Do yourself a favor and make the time to update your website.

When searching for a product or service online the first thing I do is enter a word or phase to describe what I’m looking for. If I’m looking for toys for my puppy I might enter “puppy toys” into the search box. Well, if you sell puppy toys and you do not have “puppy toys” listed in your site’s keywords, your website will not be returned as a possible resource for “puppy toys” and I’ll never know that you had exactly what I was looking for. So, how do you find out what keywords people will use when searching for your services or products? A simple but slightly labor intensive way would be to research your competitor’s sites. Go to the search engine of your choice. In the search box type a word or phrase that you think your customers would use to find businesses like yours. When the list comes up, select a competitor and click on their link. When the page comes up right click on the page and select “view source” from the menu that appears. A file with a mesmerizing amount of what looks like gibberish will open up in notepad. Look for a line that begins “<meta name=”keywords” content=” and take note of the words. Copying and pasting them into another document would be a good way to keep track. After visiting several of the top sites (the more the better), you will find that certain keywords appear more frequently than others. Try adding the top 5 or ten to the keyword section of your website.  If you don’t know where to find the keywords on your site or how to add to or change them, please send me an email or submit a comment and I’ll help you to locate them as “painlessly” as possible. (It’s a free service!) There are several other ways to determine the right keywords for your website. I’ll address additional methods in future posts. “Stay tuned!”