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What Search Engines Need (Pt. 1)What Search Engines Need to See
to Rank Your Site Well (Part 1)
Updated Feb 2006
A substantial number of people use search engines to find goods and services that interest them. However, many web designers don't pay much attention to designing sites to rank well in searches. In order to
maximize the return on investment for your website, you need to know what has to be done to get good rankings, and how to make sure that your designer has done it.
You don't have to know HOW the technical details are carried out (that's your designer's job) but you should understand the issues involved, and be able to check that certain basic criteria have been met. Caveat emptor—let the buyer beware.
First things first. What is a search ranking and how do you get one? It happens like this: once your site is on line, each search engine will send an automated program (called a spider, bot, or crawler; for simplicity's sake we'll refer to them as crawlers here) to your site. ("Submitting" your site is telling a search engine's crawler to come and look around.)
When it arrives, the crawler looks at your site and stores information about what it finds. Then, whenever a web user enters keywords into that search engine, the engine looks through its database of crawler information and returns a list of the most likely matches, in decreasing order of probability. If your site is considered a good match, it will appear in the search results list. If you're first in the list, your ranking is #1 for that search, if you're second, your ranking is #2, and so on.
As you can see, a search ranking is a rather fluid thing. Your ranking in any search depends on the keywords the web user has entered and how well your site is considered to match those keywords.
The goal for any business website is to rank as high as possible in searches for all the key phrases related to the goods/services that you carry. It's important to rank high because most users don't look past the first ten or twenty entries in a search results list. If you rank lower than that, you're much less likely to be seen.
There are two things that must happen before you can get good search rankings:
- the crawler has to be able to look into your site to see what's there
- the crawler has to see certain things that cause it to rank you high
Believe it or not, many sites fail on the first point alone. I recently assessed an existing site for an athletic instructor who routinely works with international athletes. This woman is so well-known in her field that you could paper your kitchen with her press clippings. Yet her site wasn't even ranked in the top 50 for the keywords that most people would use to find an instructor like her.
Out of curiosity, I added the word 'Edmonton' to my search, making it purely a contest among local sites. Her site was still nowhere to be found.
The problem? The site was built entirely using a design technology called 'Flash'—and crawlers can't look inside all-Flash sites. (This may improve with newer versions of Flash, but if a site is a few years old, it is still a definite problem.) So the crawler arrived at this website, found the door shut, and gave up. As a consequence, this internationally renowned instructor's website remained all but invisible on the web.
To make sure that crawlers will be able to look into your site, tell your designer you don't want an all-Flash site. Flash is a design tool intended for creating animations, not whole websites. Crawlers may not see into all-Flash sites, so these sites, although they often look very hip and 'with-it', generally get very poor search rankings.
Note: If your designer tells you that the newest version of Flash is open to web crawlers, this is true. It's open. The problem is that although the door is now open, many crawlers still don't know how to go inside.
As the search engines update their technologies, this situation will probably change, but at this point in time, if you have an all-Flash site it will probably not get crawled. So just say "I don't want an all-Flash site". Getting this in writing is not a bad idea; that way your wishes are less likely to be forgotten or ignored.
The second part of this article will explain what crawlers need to see once they get inside your site.
continue to Part 2...
