Expert Corner

For every search executed, search engines have to work through in excess of 8 billion sites and then rank these in order of relevance. This is a task which is seemingly unfathomable especially considering the speed at which the response is now delivered. The truth is that search engines have certain limitations in how they read the content on the web and in how that content is subsequently interpreted. Developing a web site project in line with the rules set by the search engines is vital in delivering a project with a chance of being found by its potential customers and interested users.

Search Engines work by sending out “crawler bots” to assess the content. These crawlers look at a number of factors and then judge how relevant that site is to the specific search term. Below is a basic summary of the most important rules for sites to be found through search engines.

Content
First and foremost , the content must be readable by search engines. Content which can be read by humans may be invisible to search engines and this is a wasted opportunity to get further on the rankings. Basically this means that text should be written in HTML format. There are tools to see what content of the site can be viewed by search engines such web browser.

Titles
The titles of a web page are a key way to explain to search engines what the content of the web site is. Search engines take the words in the title into account when deciding where you will rank for a search term so it should contain words that you want people to find you on. You should descriptively title all of your internal pages as well.

Loading Times
Slow web pages irritate search engines as well as users. Pages which are badly put together and heavy in pictures or flash and javascript slow down the speed which the pages open. Like the users, search engines will give and will leave without reading the site.

Crawlable Link Structures
A link structure ensures that some of the content is not wasted or missed by the search engines. This guides the search engine through all of your website’s pages. It can help search engines read pages that they might not have seen otherwise.

Unique Content
Copying and pasting content from other sites is plagiarism and users and search engines do not like it. www.copyscape.com is a site that allows you to put in your web page URL to find replicas of your page on the Internet. This can help you create unique content, or even find out if someone is "borrowing" your content without your permission.

Updated Content
Search Engines and users often like to see websites having new content frequently added to them. Users are unlikely to visit a website that they know is unlikely to have been updated since they were last there and equally search engines will rate higher those sites that frequently have updates and new content added. News and blogs are a great way of adding new content to the sites.

Multiple URLs
Many sites of multiple URLs for the same page. This is a result of having an http://website.com and www.website.com. These pages may be exactly the same but search engines may be confused and see them as separate sites and may even mark down the authors for duplicating the content. This needs to be remedied by creating a redirect.

Create a link network
Creating a network of links from relevant sites will lead to more users clicking through but it will also lead to the search engines coming through more often. Search engines would find the site more often because their crawlers come through from the other sites. This leads to the site being ranked with more trust and authority which will lead to a higher search engine ranking.

Don’t try to fool a search engine
Trying to manipulate the content to fool search engines is a risky game. Search Engines are cleverer than you imagine and doing things such as using hiding text, hiding links, and falsely stuffing the content full of keywords can risk getting you blacklisted from search results.


These are the main factors that need to be considered and correctly put in place in order to develop a website that works for your business.