Website Optimization

We want to use our website as a marketing tool. We need it to reach the right people. We need it to be found by more people and ultimately we want to be read by more of the right people!

So I've done a bit of research on how search engines determine which are the most relevant results to display for a search term. By its very nature this a is black art - search engines will not tell you exactly how this is done, but here is the basic idea.

Search engines crawl through the web on a regular schedule and read all of the text. They then index all of the words. They have a cached (saved) copy of the entire web in memory and can find the words in websites that match what you are searching for. To make the results meaningful, the search engine will try to display the 'best' results first - at the top of the list. So the big question is - how does it decide?

Keywords - one way to prioritize results that the search engine uses is to see how often in the page text the keyword is used. The more often a keyword appears, the more relevant the page is considered to the topic. Apparently the engines can detect 'keyword stuffing' - it will know if you are intentionally overusing a word either visibly or invisibly on a site!

Our keyword strategy should be:

• Don't use flash! Because search engines cannot read any of your flash content.
  
• Find out what keywords people are using to find your site - we use Google Analytics for this
  
• Use words and terms that are specific to the industry.
  

File names, urls and ALT tags - besides the text content of the site, search engines take into consideration the names of the files and folders of the site. You will find that you often get results based on the address of the page. ALT tags are textual descriptions of the images in a page. This text displays for the user if there are image links in the page.

Our naming convention should be:

• Use relevant and meaningful words for file and folder names.
  
• Include meaningful alt tags on images that are links
  
• Use the TITLE tag to display a succinct description of the page
  

META tags - are not important! At least they are much less important than they used to be. The reason for this is that they have historically been abused to fool search engines. And they have been a primary means for 'keyword stuffing'. Search engines now prioritize the value of text that users can actually see.

Our META tag strategy?

• Keep META tags short and simple and don't get caught 'stuffing'!
  

Links - to your site. One of the ways that search engines determine which site is the 'authority' on a particular topic is by analyzing the links to site. If a site is referenced by other sites, it is considered to be more important - their 'ranking' will increase. If the sites from which the links originate are high ranking sites, then the links will confer even more value.

Our linking strategy should be t0

• get links on relevant directories and related sites.
  
• Avoid links from the dark side of the web and artificial gimmicks that will lower our rank.

Change - the more a site is updated, the more relevant it is considered. If a search engine finds that the site changes frequently, it will consider it more relevant and improve the ranking.

Our content strategy should be to:

• Update the front page at least once a month
  
• Add new content as our development continues
  
• Make the site interesting for our clients!

As we implement changes to our website we hope to see our results improve. We have installed widgets that tell us the Alexa scores for our site and our competitors as well as a tool that gives us our Google rank every day. Currently we are ranked as site 3,851,993 by Alexa and we have four sites linking to us. We are considered a page rank 3 out of 10 by Google.

We've got some work to do - Let's spread the word!