Optimize Your Web Site Traffic

© 2001 Support Unlimited
by Bonnie L. Weinandt

The success of your web site presence relies on many variables. It is of course, a marketing tool, but more than a marketing tool; your site should be optimized as a critical tool in your everyday business. In order to achieve success with your site, your web site URL needs to be found. Search engines are available to assist your new and existing clients find your site. Too often, Internet sites are geared only to new clients, which leave your existing clients in the dust. It is important to drive traffic to your site with traditional marketing methods, such as word of mouth and print communication. In addition the following information is provided to shed some light on the technical aspect of search engines and how you can assist them in visiting your site.

Select and Implement Strategic Keywords:
One key development feature is make sure your web site developer understands and implements the key elements for search engine optimization. Provide your developer with specific keywords to implement in each page of your site. The best approach is to provide strategic keywords that are specifically referenced within the content of your page. At a minimum select a specific set for each page and add additional keywords that relate to the body of your content on the interior pages of your site. Your strategic keywords should always be at least two or more words long. Usually, too many sites will be relevant for a single word, such as "financial." This single word description means your odds of success are lower. Don't waste your time fighting the odds. Pick phrases of two or more words, and you'll have a better chance of a "top" listing on the search engines. Remember 20 to 21 keywords is sufficient, anything more is usually overkill. Many sites have too much content in them to score well for one particular page. For example, a page that has fewer words such as "Web Development", will rank higher than on that goes on and on without mentioning "Web Development" until much later in the narrative text. Each page in your site should carry specific words in the meta tags that are representative to the page itself. Spiders will rank your site based on all relevant title, meta tags (keywords) and description tags so keeping these short and to the point often best do the trick.

A word about "spiders":
"Spiders" is the common term for the technology that scans all internet sites available and indexes the site and all related web pages throughout your site for optimization on their search engines. Several search Internet directories utilize this technology while others use the "Human" entry approach. The spiders will hit your site periodically every month or so, and will delete entries that have remained the same for several months and will catch new pages and incorporate that listing to the top of the retrieval list. The more changes and updates made to your site will assist in the search engines bringing your site back up to the top of the referral listing. Another word about "spidering", just because the spider has viewed your site, it may be another week or two before your site is indexed in their database, which results in a longer wait time before your site is available on the engines retrieval list.

Add a directory:
Search engines often have trouble with sites that are based on databases, or dynamic sites. This is because the pages within dynamic sites often have links followed by a "?", which the spider simply can't interpret. While this type of page development has grown rapidly over the last few years the best way to combat this is to create an index directory for the crawler's to view. Utilizing this page as the source of your URL when submitting your site to the search engines is your best bet for the crawler to see and "feel" all the pages within your site thereby finding and ranking your site higher.

Popular Myths:
We have seen much documentation that suggests you continually need to resubmit your URL to the popular search engines for better placement. This is simply not true, if your particular URL is sent over and over again to the same engine they will eventually, promptly and permanently "boycott" your URL on their search engines. This is particularly true if the search engine is utilizing the "human approach", which exists as actual people typing in the URLs into their massive databanks. This is common sense, how would you like to look at thousands of submissions every day and constantly rummage through the duplicates? My guess is you wouldn't, the best approach is patience, time is of essence when waiting to be put in the search directories. Some search submissions can take up to six months before your URL is found on their index directory. Spiders can take even longer to find your site. Surprisingly enough, sometimes doing nothing, even with no keywords or descriptions on your site can be listed among some of the "popular" search engine listings. Case in point, a client of ours is a wholesale distributor. This client came to us with the intention of building an online catalog for their clients only. They did not want the site to be ranked in the search engines. This is not our recommendation, even for a site that is for your clients only, simply because they should have prompt access to your site without having to remember the URL. Although in order to comply to our clients desires, we added no meta tags, or meta descriptions, of course we did add page titles, but never submitted the site to search engines. Now with that particular site being more than 3 years old it happens to rank in the "popular" search engines anyway. This is a direct result of the spiders doing their work… The point is, patience is a virtue when it comes to rankings, the longer your site is up the higher your page will be ranked. Also, be sure to change pages often, as many spiders look for pages that have updated dates closest to the current date. A word of warning: be careful what you wish for and place anything "private" on your site behind the scenes in secure directories so the spiders cannot index these items.

It has been long known that .PDF files, (Universal Acrobat Reader Exchange Format) have not been included in the search engine spidering process. This is changing; "Google" is now offering indexing services on .pdf files.

Statistics Reports:
At Support Unlimited we provide our clients with the option of viewing monthly statistics reports on their web site traffic. This is an invaluable tool to assist in making decisions regarding your web site. The reports lay the groundwork for implementing strategic development of your site by providing information such as:

• How many visitors your site has received
  
• Where they have came from
  
• The paths they have gone through in your site
  
• How many "spiders" have visited
  
• Top search engine rankings and visiting spiders

The practice of reviewing these analysis tools and a monthly basis can assist in making management decisions on which pages are not being viewed and should be updated. This information is also invaluable in that it will provide information as to which keywords are being utilized. This can also determine whether or not these keywords are in need of refinement or total overhaul. It is strongly recommended to review the statistics reports monthly to ensure your site is generating the traffic and results expected.

© 2001 Support Unlimited

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