| YOUR
WEBSITE IS OF LITTLE VALUE IF PEOPLE CAN'T FIND IT AND NOBODY VISITS.
Search engines are used by
almost every Internet user to find information through "keyword" searches or by
selection of a specific category. High rankings in the world's top search engines is the
key to a successful website.
There are three important considerations
related to search engines: the user search, the means by which the search engines gather
information about existing websites on the Internet and the method employed for ranking
the results being displayed.
MegaIQ takes great pride in our continuing
attention to the changing environment of search engine methodologies. We understand
what elements, within a website's design and the underlying engineering, are critical in
achieving high rankings in the predominant search engines on the Internet.
Unlike many other website developers,
MegaIQ builds its websites with a primary design focus on the elements necessary to make
sure your website will achieve high rankings in the search engines and a secondary
enthusis on asthetics.
There are two basic types of Search
Engines:
Indexed Search Engines -
These search engines, such as Google and Excite simply require the address of your website
and they use software often referred to as "spiders" or "robots" to
read the content of your website's pages, also known as "crawling". The
spider will read the first page of your website and then crawl to each page that is linked
from that first page. Based on the content of each of your web pages, the indexing
search engine will then include each of the pages it finds in its database. When a
user performs a search, the search engine will display results of the web pages in the
order of their perceived relevance to that particular search phrase. This relevance,
or "ranking", is determined by a variety of factors.
Directory Search Engines - Directory search engines, such as Yahoo and Open
Directory, generally do not employ spiders to crawl your website. These search sites
require you to select a category in which you want your website to appear. A human
moderator will visit your website to confirm that your website is relevant to that
category. In some cases, ranking of results will be based on levels of
relevance. In other cases, the results are merely in alphabetical order.
Search Engines such as Yahoo do not always
rely solely on their own database of know websites. Yahoo, the most predominant
search engine on the Internet, draws its search results from a variety of sources
including its own database, Google's database and "Sponsored" website
links from Overture's database.
Although Yahoo now charges a fee of
$300/year to be included in their "directory" database, Google does not charge a
fee for being listed in their "Indexed" database. Therefore, if your
website is listed in Google, it will appear in the search results at Yahoo (if you have
the proper relevance for a user's search phrase.) As such, your website must be
designed properly to achieve high rankings within the Indexed search engines if you wish
to appear in the top 10 results at Yahoo.
SPONSORED LINKS - now
being displayed on a growing number of search engines, including: Yahoo, MSN, Lycos and
InfoSeek (just to name a few), are purchased on a competitive bid basis at Overature,
wherein you will be charged a fee each time someone clicks on your link to visit your
website from a search engine where those sponsored links are being displayed. This
is called a, "click through". The fee will range from a few pennies to
fifty cents or more depending on the popularity of the search phrase you are bidding for
position on.
RELEVANCE - The bottom
line on being ranked highly in the search results, for a given search phrase, is that your
web page must contain content which is "relevant" to that search phrase.
If you want to be found by people searching for "Website Designers", yet the
words "website" and "designers" do not appear anywhere in the text on
your web page, you are not going to show up.
Factors related to relevance vary from
search engine to search engine, however, most indexing search engines rely on many of the
same key factors such as the page Title and textual content. Google also considers
how many other websites have links over to your website. Therefore, broad based
submissions to hundreds of minor search and directory sites is employed by MegaIQ to
enhance rankings at Google.
LINK POPULARITY - Link
popularity has become one of the most important factors affecting your rankins at search
engines. This is a measure of how many links there are at other websites pointing to
your website. Links to your site, from other sites that are highly ranked in the
search engines has added weight. To gain link popularity, MegaIQ uses
state-of-the-art automatic submission software to register your site with hundreds of
internet sites. As a website owner, you should take time to look for websites on the
internet where you can obtain free links to your site. You should also endeavor to
trade links with your business associates, friends and associations.
META TAGS - Do not be
misled by companies who suggest that simply including hidden "meta tags" in your
web page's header will achieve high rankings. Meta tags are necessary and very
useful, but, in and of themselves they will not achieve the desired results. Only a
coordinated combination of all the necessary factors will insure good results.
DESIGN CONSIDERATIONS:
FRAMES - Some search engine "spiders", such as the one employed
by Excite, cannot crawl a website that is built using frames. A framed site uses a
"Frameset" page to define how the screen will be carved up into some number of
frames and specify which web page to display in each individual frame. A Frameset
page therefore doesn't contain any of the actual content being displayed on the
screen.
This website is built using frames.
The frameset page has split the screen into one frame on the left and this one on the
right. There is a different web page being displayed in each panel. If you
click on one of the links on the left it will change the page being displayed over here on
the right.
Unfortunately, the way a frameset page
specifies the pages of content to display in the various frames is different than the way
a standard web page link would normally appear. This difference renders it invisible
to Excite's spider. Therefore, Excite will crawl the frameset page, not see any
recognizable links to other pages in the website and not index any of the other pages of
the website. Since the frameset page doesn't contain any of the content being
displayed on the screen (the content is on the pages being called by the frameset code)
Excite will not index the frameset page either. As such, your entire website is
ignored by Excite.
Another problem with Framed websites is the
"backdoor" nature of your links from the search engines. As mentioned
earlier, each of the pages in your website will be included in the search engine database.
If a user searches for "Search Engine Registration Services", this page
you are reading would likely be in the search results and the link from the search engine
would bring you directly to this page, not the main entrance of our website. Without
coming in through the "frontdoor", you will have skipped the frameset page so
the screen will not contain the menu on the left. So, we may have accomplished
getting a user to our website, but, by coming in through the "backdoor", they
don't have the navigation necessary to view anything else in our website.
By understanding these limitations, MegaIQ
can design your website to overcome those problems. Yes, it is possible to still
employ frames in the design, provided there are extra measures employed to insure that
search engine spider's can find your web pages and that all of your web pages have the
necessary links to provide navigation to the rest of your website. Although we have
not employed it on this website, a web page designed to appear within a frame can be made
to check to see if the frames are in place and if not, automatically switch to the
frameset page so your website would appear exactly as it was intended even if someone came
in the backdoor.
FLASH - Often times,
website designers use Macromedia Flash to deliver synchronized multi-media presentations
on a web page. Although Flash presentations can be very glamourous and appealing,
there are serious limitations associated with the implementation of Flash if it is not
done properly.
Flash components (graphics, sounds and
links) are embedded in a movie file. The movie file is normally very large making
the download time for users with a slow, dial-up connection, very long. Because the
content being presented is all embedded in the movie file, search engine spiders cannot
"see" that content. The spider will be unable to follow the links to the
other pages in your website, thus preventing those pages from being indexed.
Important keywords, in the textual content embedded in the movie file is also invisible,
reducing the potential relevance of your page in relation to those search keywords.
Once again, understanding this limitation
is the key to preventing the website from being designed without consideration for how
this will impact your search engine rankings. MegaIQ may employ Flash within the
content of a website, where it's use would be in conjunction with other components rather
than as the platform for the entire presentation such that it will not reduce the ranking
potential of the page.
DYNAMIC WEB PAGES - Some
websites are designed using technologies, such as "Active Server Pages" and
"DHTML". These technologies generate the web pages "dynamically"
or "on-the-fly". This is most often employed when the content of the page
is coming from an on-line database.
This approach is commonly employed by Real
Estate websites and Shopping Carts. The advantage to this technology is that the
owner of the website has the capability of managing their inventory information through an
administrative web page that enables them to update the information in the on-line
database.
Many search engine spiders will refuse to
index dynamically generated pages into their search engine. Their reason for this
policy is that the content of the page is expected to change frequently so the reliability
of the relevance of this page to the search keywords that the spider determines during its
visit will probably not be maintained.
MegaIQ encourages its clients to avoid such
dynamically generated content. If self maintenance is an important consideration for
the owner of a website, MegaIQ will provide training to the owner's staff on the methods
of editing standard web pages so the required maintenance consideration is achieved
without sacraficing search engine exposure.
SUBMISSION CONSIDERATIONS:
1. Prior to submitting your website
to the major search engines, it is imperative that your web pages are optimized for the
keywords relevant to your website. MegaIQ is skilled at reviewing the structure and
content of your website to determine if additional optimization is required and will
perform any necessary changes to insure favorable results.
2. In order to achieve high rankings,
where link popularity is a factor, you need numerous links from other websites.
MegaIQ uses an automated submission process which gives your website links in over 1,000
minor search engines and directories. Although these listings will not directly
generate any significant levels of traffic to your website, they will boost your link
popularity, improving your rankings in the search engines where it counts.
ONLY A COMPREHENSIVE
APPROACH TO DESIGN AND ENGINEERING CAN INSURE THAT YOUR WEBSITE WILL NOT ONLY BE
ASTHETICALLY APPEALING, BUT, PEOPLE WILL FIND YOU ON THE INTERNET!
MegaIQ provides that
comprehensive design strategy in every website we build.
That's why we call
ourselves, "Website Architects", not just designers.
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