What Makes a Website Visible to Search Engines?
It’s one of the most common questions I get, “What makes a website visible to search engines?” There are many misconceptions and invalid information being bandied about that I’d like to help clarify. Read on to find out what search engines are looking for and how they go about classifying searches.
Search engines want to know which website is the most important for a particular concept. These concepts are represented by keywords or key phrases such as “Jacksonville computer company” or “internet marketing” or “SEO services” or something like that.
Search engines are hierarchical thinkers. After reading billions of pages of content by using search “spiders,” which are computer programs utilized to automatically search through website content, search engines determine the relevance of each of the pages for keywords and keyword phrases based on a complex series of rules and algorithms that change regularly. There is no standard rule or algorithm, so don’t let people convince you that there are. Every search engine does it differently and they all change regularly to accommodate the fast paced changing world of the Internet.
When you go to a search engine and type in a keyword or keywords (Jacksonville internet marketing services for example), the search engine picks the best matches by looking at the following in hierarchical order:
- A site’s authority on the subject of Jacksonville internet marketing services as demonstrated by links from other sites about the subject. Every link from other relevant sites is a vote for the target site’s authority.
- Whether Jacksonville internet marketing services is the main focus of each site, as demonstrated by the site structure.
- Which pages on those sites are most dedicated to Jacksonville internet marketing services.
- Whether those pages are more relevant than all the other pages in the search engine’s index.
All you have to do is get yourself to the top of each of those pyramids, and life is good! Well, maybe it’s not as simple as all that. Thousands and even millions of other sites will all be vying for the same top spot. To really compete, you will need to know how web pages are built and how search engines read them. If you know those two things, you can provide what search engines want: a structure that indicates what a page is really about.
Search Engine Optimization, commonly referred to as SEO, is basically making a web page optimized for the search engines to find them. This is a very hot topic right now, but it has always been the focus of web sites since the creation of the first search engine…which, I might add, was NOT Google despite their clear dominance in the industry. Creating SEO is a process of getting your site as visible to search engines as possible with the focus required to capture the keywords and keyword phrases that are really relevant to your business and what you are attempting to purvey.
If you are looking to get noticed on the Internet but don’t know where to begin, let PTC Computer Solutions help you get started or help improve your current website and website marketing plan. We can plan a full budget for your company and complete any web marketing efforts you wish to achieve to deliver a consistent and effective message to your prospects. Contact David W. B. Parker (the “W. B.” stands for WeB) at davidp@ptccomputersolutions.com or go to www.ptccomputersolutions.com for more information.
By David W. B. Parker
President
PTC Computer Solutions
5/6/2013