Designing A Friendly Site

Search Friendly Principles

The majority of your website's visitors will find your site through doing searches on the web. Search engines use "web crawlers" to visit the web sites in their databases and bring back relevant information.

Elements That Give Sites Better Rankings

Because the "web crawlers" are computerized and looking at so many sites, they follow certain rules that one should keep in mind when creating a site:

"Web crawlers" only pick up text content, so any information you have in pictures or fancy java content will not be sent to the search engines.
Most search engines give the html titles you give each of your pages the highest priority. If someone searches for "frog" and your page is titled "Frog Statue" your page will thus recieve a higher ranking than one titled statue. Thus it is good to be specific in the titles you give each of your pages. (NEVER leave the html title as "Untitled." Not only does this look unprofessional, but it will also hurt your hits).
The body text at the top of your pages also counts for more.
The level of directory is also important. If you divided your site into folders to help out with organization, be careful. Many "web crawlers" will only go 3 or 4 folders/directories deep.
If you increase the number of "good" outside sites that link to yours, your site will recieve better standing. Search engines rank the sites in their database, putting the "good" sites at the top of the search results pages. Having others that rank highly linking to you, puts your site into a "good" position as well.
As for metatags, they can be useful, but are worth the same as any other text on your page and are not used by all search engines (including AltaVista and Google). Metatags are hidden text of two types: keyword (ex. <meta name="keyword" value="french, cuisine, restaurant, dining, food, bagette, wine, cheese, france, vin, fromage, san deigo">) and description (ex. <meta name="description" value="Le Petit Papillon is the best in french cuisine this side of the Atlantic. Located in beautiful San Deigo. Call 555-666-7777 or make reservations online.>).
- Many feel that the keyword metatag is not worth your time; however some search engines still take them into account. There are a number of sites to help you find the most frequently searched keywords, and thus increase your sites hits; however, bear in mind that many others will be using these same sites. Including rare words in your keyword meta-tag (or html title or the text at the top of your page) can also be helpful. Nevertheless here are some keyword finder sites:
- As for the description metatags, these are supported by almost all search engines. This is the text that will show up in the search results page. If you do not include this metatag, your site description will consist of the body text at the top of your page (which should be relavent regardless).

Elements That Give Sites Worse Rankings

There are a number of "bad" sites on the net which contain no real content but merely exist to get traffic from search engines, or sites that have tried to "trick" search engines into giving them a top rating, though their content may not be applicable. Due to this, if the "web crawlers" find certain criteria on your site, they will label yours as a "bad" site and either downgrade your website's positioning or remove it from its database entirely. As much as possible avoid doing the following:

Repetition or large number of keywords or keywords that are unrelated to the content on the page
Short pages
A text color that matches or is very close to the background color
Multiple redirects
Pages that only contain hidden content

Submit to Search Engines

Once you've set up your site to be search friendly, you'll want to submit your site to search engines. Below are the search engines you should sumit to (the link will take you directly to the submit page):

If you don't want to submit your site individually to each search engine, there are also sites that will do the work for you. Links to these follow:

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