Wednesday, 9 February 2011

Understanding how Search Engines Work - STEP 1

The first thing you as a website owner needs to understand is how search engines work. Then you will be able to look at your website and see what changes you need to make (we call this optimising) in order to make your site more visable to search engines.

Search Engines ( Google, Yahoo, Bing etc etc)
A search engine is where you type or search for something (Not teaching you how to suck eggs) but the terminolagy will be useful in later posts.

Now what you search for, that word or phrase can now be called a Search Term or Keyword.

Right back to Search engines, these are basically computer programs, they cannot see pretty pictures, flash design, they read text...text...text  !!!

Let me show you :

Go to google and type in a Search Term related to your site (if your site does not appear then type in your domain name so your site appears in the Search Results)

I took Plumbers



  • PIMLICO PLUMBERS - THE FIRST NAME IN PLUMBING - has been established for over 30 years and with over 133 engineers Pimlico Plumbers are the largest ...
    www.pimlicoplumbers.com/ - Cached - Similar

    Pimlico Plumbers - Plumbing - plumber london | central heating repair





    • Now click on the word Cached

     The site that will now appear is the cached version of the website. Search Engines are constantly trawling the World Wide Web. A great misonception is that the web is insatantaneous, well the cached version is when a search engine, in this case Google last visited the site and took a snap shot, it uses infomation during this visit to be able to display the site when someone searches for a related search term within the site.

    At the top of the page you will notice a box :

    This is Google's cache of http://www.pimlicoplumbers.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 1 Feb 2011 05:28:56 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more

    These search terms are highlighted: plumber  

    This tells you the page that was Cached and indexed, the time and date. Interesting to note that this was last visited (for a split second) on the 1st of Feb and today is the 9th of Feb.

    It shows you the search term Search for by you.

    Now if you click on the Text-only version, it will show you the text on the site.

    The text only version will show you what the search engine has been able to read. Now if you have a flash based website by now you have realised that there is no text on my site, OMG, the penny drops again !!

    If you have no text, very little text and text without "Keyword / Search Term" content, then how do you expect a little computer program like a search engine to relate your website to a search term typed into it ?

    So that is the First lesson :  Keyword Rich Content is KING 

    Homework: Look at your front page text and see how you may be able to expand this to include relevant Search Terms / Keywords in the text.

    Rember not to Spam your keywords and your text still needs to engage your customers !
    Posted by at

    3 comments:

    1. Deborah Spagnuolo30 March 2011 at 12:24

      The fact that search engines can't read Flash is an important one to stress. If your site has a lot of cool moving parts, it's likely you have Flash. While it looks great, it isn't great for SEO

      ReplyDelete
    2. Deborah Richmond30 March 2011 at 12:32

      Learning to place keywords into the right places takes time. But if you do it a while, it gets easier to place them in in a fashion that doesn't seem awkward or out of place.

      ReplyDelete
    3. Deborah Richmond30 March 2011 at 12:39

      It really is important to understand how the search engines operate and how they pull information. Knowing this allows us to pay attention to the right elements on a page.

      ReplyDelete

    Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)