Broken Arrow Media
Frequently Asked Questions - Search engines
Great my site is launched. When will it be on google/MSN/Yahoo?
The million dollar question. Because there are now literally billions of sites on the web, most people would use a search engine to initially find the site or the services that they want.
As I'm sure you know from using search engines, they bring back thousands of results, and most people don't bother to look beyond the first 30 or 40 of them.
There are 2 key things to do for a new website. The first is get your site noticed by all the search engines, so that they at least know you exist, and then to start getting your website more popular with them so that you start to get higher and higher up the list of results.
It just isn't enough today to just build a website, and expect to be on the front page of Google. It simply won't happen.
We offer a range of marketing services to suit your budget to help your site get noticed. The way your website is built can also have an effect on your search engine rankings, and we always build our sites to be as visible as possible for maximum exposure, but we can also help you to promote your website online.
There are no cheap quick fix solutions for getting your site noticed, but with the right help, it is possible to get a good google ranking.
How does a search engine decide it's rankings?
That would probably be the billion dollar question, and the answer is that no-one really knows for sure.
The criteria that search engines use to determine ranking is a closely guarded secret. After all, if everybody knew what made a web site highly ranked, then everyone would have a top ten web site, and the whole system would fall apart. Plus, the criteria for ranking is constantly changing, as Google, Yahoo and MSN constantly improve their search engines.
There are certainly many factors that help a search engine determine the ranking of a website based on a search by a web user. Here are just a few of the most important of those that are common knowledge.
- The Keywords used to describe the site
- The amount of content, and it's relevance to the keywords
- How often the content changes
- How many other sites link to your site, and the relevance of them to you.
- The age of the site
- How many times the keywords are used in the main content of the site.
- The amount of traffic your site gets
- The way the site has been built
Basically the search engines are trying to apply common sense and logic to finding the best results for the words that a web surfer has put in for a search. They want to know that the results they are bringing back are the most meaningful, the most current, and the most useful for the information the person wants to find out about.
It doesn't always work like that, but unfortunately websites have to play by their rules in order to get noticed.
What are keywords?
Keywords are a set of words that get put into the top of a web page that describe what it is about. They don't get displayed on the web page itself. Thy're not there for you or me to read, they are there for the search engines to browse so that it can determine what your site is about.
You can have several keywords or groups of keywords to describe what your business does, the kinds of products it sells, where you are based etc. You don't want to go overboard with them, but you need a good number of them to properly describe your site.
A good way to pick keywords for your site is to look at your competitors who have good search results, and see what terms they are using, or even to put yourself in the mind of a customer and imagine what words they would put into a search engine to help them find the kind of information or products that you have on your site.
You also need to make sure that those keywords are used generously within the main content of your site. That way, when the search engines scan your site regularly, they will know that your site is actually relevant to the subject that your keywords have said it is.
Who should I link my site to?
Some people go all out to get their sites linked to other sites, because they've heard that that is what will get them noticed by search engines.
It is true that links are a great help in getting traffic through to your site, and also help search engines find your site, as well as deciding how popular it is based on the number of sites linking to it. The key thing to remember though is RELEVANCE.
If you run a florists, and you have a link to your site from your friends garage web site, then a search engine is not going imagine there is much crossover between the subject matter of your two sites. If you had a link to your site from a garden centre, or a site about flowers, then it would be more interested, and score the link more highly.
Also sites that are more popular than yours, i.e. ones that appear higher on search engine results than yours, that link to you, will help you. A search engine will make the assumption that if the popular site deems your site to be interesting enough to have a link to, then your site should possibly be ranked higher.
As with so many other things in business, it's about networking. You should be forming links and alliances with businesses that are relevant to yours, and more sucessful than yours.
