Once you have placed your web site on the Internet how will people find it?

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Search Engines

A search engine is a database system designed to index internet addresses. The typical search engine contains a special program often called a spider (also sometimes called a "bot" or "crawler"), the spider accepts a url, it then goes to that web site and retrieves a copy of the file found there. The search engine will process that copy of the file, distilling it down to the bare essential data it needs for the data base. The search engine's program then makes the determination as to what web sites are listed in the database and what ranking your web site will have for any keyword or phrase

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Directories

A directory is basically a manual entry database system. You, as the end user submitting your url, will supply the directory with all of the needed information during the submission process. At a minimum, this information includes, url, title and a short summary of your web site. Rarely will the directory have any program capable of visiting your web site, although a few directories do have a simple spider capable of verifying that the url you provided was a valid url.

As you can see both search engines and Directories are essentially databases, which contain web site addresses and information about the sites. Some of these are specialists only containing sites of a particular nature eg site on education or sites on a particular industry. Others are generalists and contain information on a wide range of topics. To enable the right kind of people to find your site it is important that the best search engines and directories have you site listed on their database.

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Site Design

Following are some brief notes on designing search engine friendly web sites. These notes provide a starting point in addressing the design features that help to make a web site easy for the search engines and directories to list sites and to assist in maximising the ranking of the site. There are many sites on the internet that provide much more information on this important topic. Some of which have been used for source material here.

Text

Because most search engines and directories predominately use text to assess the content of a site visible text and the content of that text is the most important element in getting your site listed and its ranking. If listing and the ranking is important to you then it is vital that the content of your site be of the highest quality. It should be; useful, informative and relevant.

Graphics

Search engines and directories don't "see" graphics they only see the file name. Therefore giving the graphic an appropriate file name as well as supplying alternative text for the graphic will aid search engine rankings.

Descriptive URL's

Naming files so that the name is descriptive of the topic in that document makes the url more descriptive. This helps to boost the relevancy of the site to the search engines and also to boost the ranking of your site. For example in a web site for shoes, naming a file boots.html rather than products.html creates url more descriptive and thus assists the search engine. It also has the added advantage of making design easier as the files are more easily recognisable to the designer.

Flash and other fancy "gadgets"

As a simple rule of thumb the more "gadgets" in your site the harder it is for search engines to spider your site therefore you should try to keep your site simple. This can sometimes be at odds with what you are trying to achieve visually and interactively. A sensible balance is what you should be trying to achieve. Use of animation such as Flash and other gadgets needs to be in such a way as to minimise the negative impact on search engines.

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Meta Tags

These are special tags used in the HTML documents that appear in the head section and contain information about the page that is important to search engines and directories. Meta tags are not able to be read by all search engines and it is important not to rely on tags alone to determine your sites listing content and design are also important. The three most important tags are:

Description Tags

The description tag enables you to provide a description of your site which is up to 200 characters in length. It enables those search engines that can read tags to read a summary of your sites content.It is important that this summary is well written and is informative as to the content of the site. This will help to improve rankings and present the viewer with a good introduction to your site. Remember this is the first impression of your site.

Keyword Tags

The keywords tag is used to help aid search engines in indexing your web site. This is important, the search engines use this information to determine under what queries your web site will come up under.

Keywords included in this tag should be specific enough to place your site in a category that is small enough to enable your site not to get lost in a larger number of web sites. The keywords should therefore localise your site geographically and in content. Other keywords should be chosen according to what words are important in your site and what words viewers are likely to use in searching for sites.

Robot Tags

These tags provide information, to the robots that crawl sites, which helps them in indexing your site.

Inbound Links

In determining your ranking, Search Engines don't only look at your web site. They also look at other web sites that have links to your web site. Links to your web site from other appropriate web sites on a any particular keyword search will help in boosting your ranking. It is therefore important to get as many appropriate inbound links as possible

Social Media

Social Media such as Facebook and Linkedin also provide inbound links, advertising and networking that can also improve targeted traffic to your web site.