Home > Writing Advice & Resources > What Search Engines Need (Pt. 2)

What Search Engines Need to See
to Rank Your Site Well (Part 2)

Updated Feb 2006
As discussed in Part 1 of this article , there are two things that need to happen before your website can rank well in searches:

1. your site must be designed with a technolgy that allows the search engine's crawler to look into your site to see what's there
2. the crawler has to see certain things that cause it to rank your site well

The first issue was dealt with in Part 1 of this article, so let's look at the second issue now.

A Little Background

To understand this section, you need to know one techno-fact about web design: web designers use little codes, called "tags", to specify how your site should be displayed and to tell the Internet what certain elements of your site are supposed to be. For example, if I want a certain phrase displayed in bold, I code it using 'bold' tags, like this:

<B>Holy Cow!!!</B>

Everything between the two tags, <B> and </B>, will be displayed in bold. (The tags themselves will be invisible to anyone looking at the web page.)

As a second example of using tags, if I want a phrase displayed in the Title banner at the extreme top left of my web browser, I put the phrase inside 'title' tags like this:

<Title>This is the Page Title</Title>

and the computer will know that the phrase is a page title and that it should go way up at the extreme top left of the page, above the browser controls.

Tags are important because they can be used to make the crawler rank your site better. We'll return to this idea a little later.

The next concept you need to understand is "keywords". Keywords and key phrases are the words and phrases that people search for when they're looking for a site like yours. Increasingly, people are searching with phrases, rather than single words (example: "tax accountant", rather than just "accountant").

Enough background. Every search engine analyses sites differently, but in general, here are the basic things a search engine crawler needs to see in order to rank your site well:

• key phrases in page titles. Make sure your designer uses the 'Title' tags on every page of your site to you create unique page titles that include the appropriate key phrases for that page.
• key phrases in Heading tags. Heading tags (example: <H1>This Text is Tagged as a Heading</H1>) are tags that designers can add to make text display in a larger size than the rest of the text. These tags serve double duty in that they tell crawlers that what's inside the tags is very important in determining what the site is about.

  For best search rankings, your designer should break up the text on your pages into sections, give each section a heading that includes keywords and/or phrases, and put the headings into Heading Tags. Note: Just increasing the font size will not do the job. The headings MUST be put inside tags for the crawler to pay them special attention. Just say to your designer "Did you use heading tags for all the headings?" If the answer is no, get them added.

• key phrases scattered throughout the text. Reading the text is one major way that search engines decide what your page is about.

  One easy way to boost your visibility to local customers is to include keywords related to your location (e.g. Alberta, Edmonton, etc.). This is especially useful if you sell a service. Someone wanting a physiotherapist in Edmonton is quite likely to search for "physiotherapy Edmonton", so if you add location information in key places on your site, (your page titles, for example), these targeted searches are far more likely to find you.

• limit the use of animations. Well-ranked sites tend not to use them. In a 2002 study of how Google ranked 100,000 web pages for 1721 popular key phrases, results showed that only 4.3% of the sites that got top-ten ranking used animations. This is one very good reason to limit the use of animations on your site; if you use a lot of them, your search rankings may suffer.

This article has explained some very basic things your web designer can do to improve your website's search rankings. It's not an exhaustive list; there are many more things that can be done. However, by following these basic guidelines, you can make your website significantly more visible to internet users who are searching for your product or service. For more information on improving search rankings, here are some resources:

In Print
"The Plain English Guide to Getting an Effective Website"
Extensive advice on how to design a website from the ground up for good search rankings, including a section on how to be sure your web designer picks effective keywords.

Online Resources
searchenginewatch.com
search.com