Past Tense

I have been operating web sites for the last couple of years. I have developed a proven method of getting the sites I run into the search engines quickly. I then use that same method to help get them to rank well for a small number of keywords, allowing the buoyancy effect to come into play for the rest of the site when one or two keywords ranks very high. In case you were not aware, when one or two keywords rank well within a given site, many secondary keywords enjoy a buoyancy effect and are lifted because of the nice rankings of the main keywords.

I like to review a handful of concepts with the design team before we launch a new site. I like to start by checking for H1 and H2 tags being used throughout the main pages of the web site. Search engine spiders are quick to notice and crawl text in these tags, so they are important in helping the spiders to understand the theme of the site. With good content and the right tags to support them, the site will quickly be crawled by the spiders, the theme will be correctly derived and the search engines can start sending traffic to the site when people request information using the keywords.

I will also look for the use of anchor text on the home page pointing to other main pages in the site. The use of image text should be kept to a minimum as I have been able to help many website owners achieve better rankings by moving the text away from the image and into the body of the website. The search engines cannot read images, so you miss an important opportunity to have them read the text contained within any image. The solution is to shrink the image, remove the text and position the text around the image in an attractive manner.

For each main keyword in the site I like to have a unique page that highlights it. Search engines give intrinsic value to pages that contain the keyword in the name and title of the page, right in the html name. For example, a page written for diamond rings should contain anchor text for diamond rings in the home page and be named the same as the anchor text. When this naming and anchor text convention is used the search engines will instantly award the right theme and indexing for the keyword.

I then move my efforts to looking for dashes and underscores in naming conventions. There are many solid examples of pages indexing better using dashes and not underscores in their name. I have no clue as to why this is but it has been proven so we should all follow the rule. If all else is equal, two pages named search-engine.htm and search_engine.htm will not rank the same. There have been lots of studies done to support this theory so I always remove the underscores from all file and page names.

Finally, a great question to ask yourself is what the search engines think the theme of your site is. The Google Keyword Tool is one of the best ways to find out the theme of the site from a spiders perspective. You will enjoy finding out what the search engine thinks your site is about by reviewing the keywords that it brings back to you. Many people are surprised to find out that what they intended the site to be about is not at all what the search engines believe it is about so we go about fixing the issue. I am usually able to quickly remedy the situation by highlighting keywords through H2 tags and by adding no follow rules to the links that are inside of the site. The mismatch situation can easily be turned around if the search engines do not agree with the theme of your site.