Search Engine Optimization is something Web designers must do so that your website will be fully accessible and available to the search engines.  This usually means taking some extra time to ensure the website is setup and optimized so that the search engine such as Google_^tm can locate the information in your website and index it properly.

Search engines have programs called robots or spiders that spend all day every day following links on websites to locate new information on the Internet.  They then use this information to help their users search for keywords and if all went well your website will show up when someone searches for keywords present on your website.

Why is SEO Important?

There are usually only four ways to get visitors to your website.

1. Get people to go directly to your website (by typing it into the address bar of your browser) by advertising your site or by word of mouth
2. Get your website indexed by the search engines so people will be directed to your website when they search for relevant keywords
3. Pay for advertising on the Internet.  This can be done in two ways with pay per click advertising or paying by volume (based on how many times your ad is displayed)
4. Have other websites link to your website and direct visitors there.

Only getting the search engines to direct traffic to your website via organic search results is truly free.

So What Does SEO Require?

Optimizing a website for SEO means making it easy for the search engines spiders to locate and find all the information on your website.  There are also "hidden" fields present in most websites called Meta Data that also help the search engines by providing a description and keywords related to each web page and for the website in general.

• Make sure the meta data is properly filled out and good keywords supplied.
• Provide an up to date site map so that search engines know what pages are available to be searched.
• Ensure your robots.txt files are up to date indicating what areas the spider should look in and what to skip.
• Providing appropriate links both within your website and from external sources.

When a website is first created it is also a good idea to go around to the various search engines and submit your website to them for crawling.  Many search engines have a submission form. A few search engines will even allow your to pay to have your website listed with them.  Normally a website with good content will not need to pay to have their site indexed however.

Meta Data

The Web Design Guy prefers Joomla for managing websites and Joomla provides some excellent tools with respect to meta data.  Joomla provides an area where the user can enter the meta data and associated keywords into each web page that is entered within Joomla.  Whole site meta data and keywords are also provided.

As new web pages or articles are created it just a simple task of filling out the meta data areas of the form and this information will be displayed within the HTML code generated by Joomla

Site Maps

Site maps can be automatically generated, generated manually or generated by external software that crawls your website much like a search engine would.  Joomla has several excellent plug-ins that will automatically generate and update your site map as you expand the website. These site maps can then be submitted to Google and Yahoo (the two main search engines) so their crawlers can easily access each and every page on your website.

Websites created with other technologies may need to have the site map created either manually or with external tools.

Web Page Submission

The Web Design Guy will submit your website to the three main search engines for you.  We can submit your website to more, but usually submitting to the top three will get your site indexed effectively.  Many times submitting websites to the search engines is not even necessary because one a link is provided to your site from some external source the search engine crawlers will find your website surprisingly quickly.  We have found crawlers accessing development web pages that have only been up a very short time.

Sand Box

If your creating a new website its worth being aware that many people believe that Google does employ a concept called a Sandbox.  Basically the sandbox applies to new websites that are newly being ranked by Google.  These website will be held in the Sandbox for several months and can not get top rankings until they have been "released" from the sandbox.

Basically the sandbox is a little like a probation period for new websites and helps to ensure that spam and junk sites are not banned from google only to re-appear again within days or weeks.

The Google sandbox means your site may not rank as highly as it would otherwise for the first few months of its existence even if you've done everything well with regard to SEO.

Call or e-mail the Web Design Guy today and we can help to get your website properly setup and crawled by the search engines.  This along with providing good content goes a long way to improving your search engine ranking.

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