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How Do Search Engines View Your Site?
June 6, 2008
One characteristic every great search engine optimization expert has is that he or she is able to look at a website or blog with the eyes of a search engine spider. In other words, they know (or find out) what the search engine spider does and or looks for when they visit your site. Once you can do this, then the process becomes much easier and you do not waste time doing unnecessary things you thought were good SEO. The first lesson to learn is that search engines do not give rank to a “website” they give rank to a web page.
Therefore trying to rank your homepage for 15 different phrases won’t work for you at all. Instead you can optimize other pages on your site for different terms individually. A good way to do this is with one off my favorite plugins which I included in yesterdays post 3 WordPress Plugins I Love called the All in One SEO Plugin, which allows you to individually optimize every page for your desired term.
If you can include your desired term in the domain you choose then great, if not then that’s okay too because search engines don’t just show you the homepage domain i.e
www.topbusinessreviews.com
they also show you specific page URL’S like
www.topbusinessreviews.com/2008/06/04/choosing-the-right-affiliate-programs/
so you should try including your keyword as the URL-slug (this part of the URL:/choosing-the-right-affiliate-programs/.) Doing this is very search engine friendly and will help the search engine spider rank your site better for that term.
Another thing you wanna keep in mind is that search engines bypass images and do not read them at all. So if you have an image saying “Exchange free links,” when the spider crawls it, it will have no knowledge of the “Exchange free links” therefore no rank will be passed onto it. The only way around this is to apply an alt attribute to the image
i.e
img_src=”…/images/exchange-free-links.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ class=”image”
Above is a normal img source that a spider would bypass and not know anything about.
Below is an img source that the search engine will stop and notice due to its “alt” attribute, that describes what the img is about.
img_src=”…/images/exchange-free-links.png” width=”250″ height=”100″ alt=”Free Link Exchange” class=”image”
So make sure you if your going to place any images on your site, that you apply the alt tribute so the spider will be able to read it. These are the first basic steps that are an absolute must in order to optimize your site properly for the search engines. These are just a few of the fundamentals of SEO and you definitely need to apply this to your site, if you already haven’t.
More tips on the subject coming soon, stay tuned!
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