There are two types of search engines, those that use humans to add websites to their directory (eg LookSmart) and those that use computers to index them (eg Google).
You cannot register your website with the search engines that use computers to do the indexing. These search engines will find your website and index its pages according to the contents they find there and according to their own rules. So make certain your website has a title and description on your homepage that the search engines can easily pick up and index.
What to do
You can make the indexing of your site by computer-indexing search engines more effective by providing them with information about the contents of your site in a structured manner and in a form that they will readily recognise. This is done by inserting, in the HTML code that creates the pages of your website, information about the site. This information is called metadata because it is data about the data in your site. Simply using metadata will not ensure that your site will be at the top of the listings in all search engines, but it will certainly help. Metadata is not seen by users of your site, only by the crawlers sent out by some search engines. There are a number of internationally recognised categories of metadata, called meta-tags. The most common ones that your site should contain are:
- title tag - providing a title for your website, up to 6 words
- description tag - a 25 word sentence describing the contents of your site
- keyword tag - a list of the key words that are representative of your site's content and are words you anticipate users may enter into search engines.
How do you know what keywords to use? Ask yourself what words your target audience would enter into a search engine when looking for the very things your site offers. How might they mis-spell them and what terms do your clients use to describe your products and services? You do not have to draw up an exhaustive list but certainly capture the key words! Brainstorm these keywords with colleagues but also check out the keyword metadata used in sites similar to yours. This is easy to do. Anyone can see the metadata of any website simply by accessing the site then, if using Internet Explorer, click on VIEW in the top menu bar and then Source. If you use Netscape, click on VIEW and then Page Source.
Check your own metadata by the method described above and if your site does not have title, keywords and description meta-tags then compose what you want and contact your webmaster and get it added to the HTML of your home page. Some sophisticated websites store the metadata in a database or repository which is interrogated by the search engines. It can be created automatically by web publishing software or custom-designed metadata generating tools. See your web developer about the best solution for you.
No comments:
Post a Comment