The process of making a site "search engine-friendly" — also known as "SEO" -- is probably the most important aspect of website design. Many, many commercial websites are designed and set up by people who know little or nothing about SEO—how to give the search engines what they need to see when they index your site. This long page contains the information (or links to it) that web designers SHOULD know about optimizing a website for the search engines.
Here's a short video that explains what SEO is all about, from our friends at Common Craft. Watch this to get an overview of why it is important to optimize a website for Google and Bing (which are really the only two major search engines left).
The most important thing to know about search engines is that SEARCH ENGINES ONLY INDEX TEXT. Make that your mantra while designing and optimizing your website. They don't index images well, and they don't index Flash well. Although there are some exceptions to that rule, as search engines are becoming more intelligent and more able to index files such as PDFs and the captions of graphic files, and some of the text in a Flash file — for all practical purposes just remember that rule: Search engines only index text and you won't go too far wrong in search engine optimization.
For a technical "how to" on optimizing Flash files, see this page from J E Hochman, and for an up-to-date late-2010 summary of the pros and cons of trying to optimize Flash, see this article from WebsiteMagazine. (Note that we use these same techniques when optimizing Flash sites.)
There are a lot of small things you can do when designing or re-designing a site to get better rankings in the search engines — and every little bit helps in the end result. There is no one magic thing you can do to get top placement at a search engine for your website. But you can do a bunch of small things that will add up to excellent placement in the search engines for the key words you select that are relevant to your web pages.
You can and should optimize more than one page of your website for the search engines; it's not something you do on just one page and skip doing on the rest of the site. You can optimize your home page for your single most important keyword phrase and other pages for different key word phrases. If you sell different products on different pages, each page can be optimized for that particular product. That's a good way to organize it. We recommend search engine optimization on at least a dozen main pages of your site, for the best effect. Don't bother optimizing pages on which you do not have public content, or pages such as a "contact us" or "privacy policy" or "copyright info" pages. (No one will be searching for your copyright info.) The pages you want to optimize are the pages you want people to find — those pages with content about your service or product--whatever you are selling.
Note: If you have a database-driven website, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on how to optimize a database-driven website for the search engines.
Also Note: If you have a website that is designed using <frames>, there are special concerns. Click here for more info on optimizing a frames-built website for the search engines.
Search Engine Optimization – Let's get started!
To get a good feel for what is required in optimizing a normal commercial website for the search engines, let's pretend we're creating a website which sells after-market accessories for the "Alfa Romeo Alfetta", a 70's 4-door sports car that provides a snap-your-head-back kind of driving experience. (It is a car with a small but fanatical base of fans.) Our site will sell floor mats, hood ornaments, key chains, steering wheels, and so on -- all for the Alfa Romeo Alfetta.
Alfa Romeo Alfetta
Pick a Good Domain Name
This step is not very important - but every little bit helps. For the perfect domain name match-up in a search engine so that a page of our "Alfa Romeo Alfetta" website comes up #1 in the search results, the website itself would be best named:
http://www.alfa-romeo-alfetta.com
For more info on picking a good domain name for optimum search engine placement, and what you can do if you already have a domain name that isn't very good in this respect, click here. Don't sweat it if you haven't got a great domain name, you can skip this step. This aspect of search engine optimization doesn't count for much, just a little. There used to be a big benefit at Google to having an "exact match domain" that matched your key words -- not so any more.
Back to top of page.
Pick a Good Web Hosting Company
What type of website hosting company do you have? This can be very important to the search engines. Free website hosting is usually bad for search engine rankings, for several reasons. For a detailed article about how your website hosting company can affect your rankings in the search engines by Larisa Thomason (Senior Web Analyst for NetMechanic), click here.
The most important factor is that your website should have its own "static" IP address. In other words, its numeric IP address should be stable, and not be different every time someone types in your URL--that's called a "dynamic" IP Address and is typical of Windows IIS Hosting. Big hosting companies typically use "dynamically assigned" IP addresses which work this way: when someone types in your URL into his browser, the HTTP request is presented to your hosting company's server, which quickly assigns an IP address to your website files on its server and connects the visitor to your files. Some search engines don't like this, for various technical reasons.
But more importantly, if your web hosting company has some "bad hats" (spammers or pornographers or whatever) who have been banned from search engines for good reason, your site could also be banned "by association" because, to the Search Engine your site's IP address looks to be that of the bad hats. In the eyes of the search engines it has an identical numeric IP address -- the one that belongs to your web hosting company.
If you are serious about getting good search engine rankings for your site, you need to have a static IP address of your own. If you don't know whether you do or not, call or email your web hosting company and find out whether your IP address for your site is static or dynamic. If it a static IP address, they should be able to tell you exactly what your static numeric IP address is. Find out what that is. For example, the static numeric IP address for Words in a Row is: 66.254.93.43. You should be able to substitute your numeric IP address after the "http://______", type that into your browser and go directly to your website.
There's another way to find out if you have a dynamic or static IP address, and that is to use this tool provided free by Bruce Clay:
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