What The Search Engines Are Looking For

Friday, September 3rd, 2010

No Bull SH$! Print this out or write it down. It will serve you well!

Search engine bots crawl the internet spitting back the results you see when you do a search online. To get an idea of what the bots see check out the Lynx text based web browser. As you can see from the screenshot below all the bots see are text or text embedded within an image.

lynx What The Search Engines Are Looking For

Viewing the internet like this gives you an appreciation for search engine optimization. It’s why including text where ever you can in a website helps to make you that much more relevant. It’s another reason why CSS is so popular nowadays. At any rate, below is a short list of what the spiders are looking for. The hierarchy of what has most relevance and what in turn gets you better organic rankings.

1. Universal Resource Locator

The most relevant part of your website is your URL. It’s a good idea to include your top keyword or keyword phrase when purchasing your new website. This is the first thing the search engines look at when they visit a site. Doing keyword research before purchasing a domain will go a long way for you SEO-wise.

2. Page Title

The title of your actual page is what the spiders will see next. The title being what ever is entered into the, “Title”, tag at the top of your page. After your url this will give readers a better idea of just what to expect on this page. Again keyword research here will go a long way for you. Naming your page something like, “About Us”, is not as relevant as, “About Fictitious Companies Extensive Product Line”. It’s more descriptive and gives you a chance to add more keyword phrases. Performing a keyword search of relevant terms for your article using Google Adword’s keyword tool will help you determine which keywords you should be writing about to garner better search results.

3. Use Of Heading Tags

These being H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6. The bots see this as the next most relevant part of your page. Be sure not to over-use your header tags as that would be silly and not to mention gaudy. Just make sure to try and include your keyword or phrase in some variation when creating headers. It’s all about keyword importance. It’s a good idea to search out variations on your keyword and add them in your headers. It will help with relevancy and traffic from other possible search terms.

4. Alt’s And Title Tags

These are specific to your images. I’m not referring to the page title. Make sure all your images have alt’s and title tags. This not only helps with page relevancy, but gives image searches another way to tag your material. You can use these tags to include again variations on your keyword, but keep in mind that density is also an important factor when constructing a well written article for search.

5. Keyword Density

This has to do with the amount of times your keyword appears on your page. The more it appears the more relevant your page is. Be careful not to over do it. Needless repetition of your keyword will start to look spammy or link-farmy. If your keyword can be repeated in the title or header tags that’s a good route to go. Some times making your phrases more specific is a good way to re-include your keyword without over doing it.

The Equation

URL + Page Title + Heading Tags + Alt’s And Title’s + Density = Conversion.

This is what we’re all looking for. Getting traffic to our sites and ultimately getting a sale, a click, a contact, a submission, etc. So know your niche. Spend some time researching what people are typing in to find you. Pay attention to the user as they change their minds and trends don’t always last.

Interested in creating your own masked effect graphics? Check out this post here.

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About Me: Nate Balcom is a web designer and social media guru with over 11 years of experience in the web industry. He specializes in web design and development, SEO and social networking. You can follow him on Twitter here.