Collections Insider

Every small business with a website desires page #1 results in Google and other major search engines to bring in the business. However, if you are like many unfortunate small business owners, it is only just that, a desire. In this multi-part article series, I’ll break down the essentials in simple layman’s terms to educate even the non-computer savvy person on how to get better results from your website.

So what are better results? Obviously, having business generated via your website. But before you can make it right and find more traffic, you have to know what’s wrong first.

Harmony in website design is Golden Rule #1

Presentation to a search engine is meaningless, but certainly important to website users. Search engines only see text as content, not pictures or images with words in them. People see the opposite and often make decisions based on presentation. Harmony with both design and content optimization must exist for a website to be successful.

Whether you built your own website or spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars to have it done for you, don’t assume that a pretty, professional looking design should merit a page #1 placement in search engine results.

There are web designers and search engine optimization specialists. Usually, both don’t exist together in harmony due to differences in opinion. The professionals in the industry can do both and are often in high demand. Therefore their services are often expensive. Most web designers are only concerned about page design and customer interaction and usually lack search engine optimization knowledge. On the flip side, search engine optimizers usually lack designing skills and generally lose out to designers who build pretty pages. Business clients often fear having a website “being too cluttered with text” and feel that images, pictures and presentation build perception and trust. There is no doubt that good presentation builds perception, however it is completely useless if your website isn’t found in the first place. That’s where optimization comes into play.

Some of the ugliest but successful websites ever known place on page #1 for free in Google’s search results. Why? Generally speaking, they usually have good content and other relevant websites link to it. They also have frequent visits by search engine spiders (explained below) looking for updated content. These are but a few reasons as to why they do well, however they are some of the most important reasons.

Invite some friendly creepy-crawly spiders!

Search engines employ “spiders”, their own automated web search, that constantly searches or “crawls” the entire world-wide web over and over again to find websites and updated website content. If and when they find your website, they try to establish your theme based on titles and content, schedule a time to revisit more of your website content and follow your links to see what else it can find. The more a web spider “crawls” your website files, the more important your website appears to that search engine and the higher your website places in the search results for your keywords.

To gain a better perspective, here’s a link to a website containing free and wonderful website research tools. This link Search Engine Spider Simulator will show you results similar to what a search engine spider “sees” when it crawls your website. Can you read your content and does it make sense? If not, don’t worry too much as you are in the majority.

When was the last time your website was crawled? Try this: search for your website in Google by only typing your website address (example: yourwebsite.com) in the search window, not in the top address window. Your website should come up first in the free search results area. If not, then Google may not even know your website exists. No wonder you’re not getting web traffic! Simply put, if you are not listed in Google, your business website really doesn’t exist to your potential customers. Statistics prove that Google is by far the most respected and therefore the most used search engine in existence. You need to be in Google if you wish to compete online. As for other search engines, at the time of this authoring, MSN ranks second, then Yahoo!, then the rest.

If your website does come up in the Google search, click on the blue “Cached” link under your description. On the page that opens, Google will tell you when it last crawled your website. Check this regularly. If it’s been longer than one month on average, you are not very important to Google and likely other search engines as well. Your website would rank much higher if it was visited more often. You can’t control the visit schedule, but you can make changes to your website to peak the spider’s interest to want to come back more often. I’ll focus more on this in a later article.

What to look for and what to do

So what can I do right now you ask? Start with a simple evaluation of your website then get with your webmaster and make some changes. Here’s a list of the top 10 simple but common mistakes I find. This should get you started for now:

1. Wrong title used in the title bar at the top-left of the browser window. Is your business name in here, or even better, does it say Home Page? It shouldn’t be either unless that is your keyword or key phrase people search for.
2. Your domain name is renewed every year with your registrar as opposed to expiring beyond five years or more. Year-by-year renewal doesn’t show a stable domain. Contact your domain registrar and extend your renewal date today!
3. Your business name, keywords or important logo text is placed inside an image. Search engines can’t read images. To test this, try to select, then copy and paste the text in question. If you can’t, it’s part of the image and not readable by a search engine.
4. Too many pictures or images, ads, and not enough content. Images and pictures should also have a little yellow box giving alternate text in case the images can’t be viewed.
5. Navigation links don’t contain keywords or are made of images.
6. Too many keywords making both the content read poorly and search engines marking it off as spam.
7. No theme established to explain the website content. Would you read a book if you didn’t know what the title meant?
8. No document title hierarchy and improper structure.
9. Geographical advertising area keywords not used correctly.
10. Poor keyword use, poor placement, or lack of key phrases in the content.
11. Wrong content used. In other words, doesn’t relate to the website theme at all.
12. Lack of inbound links from websites that relate to your content.

In the articles to follow, I’ll break down each of these areas and explain how to make the needed corrections. Of course, I’ll use plenty of examples to help any beginner make those needed changes. Keep in mind that these are not the only search engine optimization techniques used, just a short list of the most basic ones that can make a huge impact on small business websites not already utilizing them.

About the author: John Kelly is a free lance web designer and search engine optimization specialist. His niche is small business website optimization and consultation. He is also the webmaster and I.T. specialist for YourCollectionSolution.com.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 3rd, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Website Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.