I took a quick look at the site, and immediately saw that it was over-designed -- that the page design was getting in the way of search engines ever seeing and indexing the content.
Content can drive traffic to a Web site by way of search engines. But
many well-established and expensive sites are designed in such a way that
search engines cannot see the text on their pages. In such cases, simply
registering pages with search engines
accomplishes nothing.
Many sites present dynamic pages -- generating pages on-the-fly from
databases. Such pages typically have a ? in the URL,
which serves as a stop sign for search engine crawlers. These crawlers
need to avoid being trapped at dynamic sites, which
could generate huge number of pages, clogging search engine indexes
with useless content.
Other sites use javascript in such a way that very little text is visible
to search engine crawlers. Even the links to other pages at
your site may be buried, so that if a crawler finds one page at your
site, it can't follow a trail of links to discover the rest of your
site.
Other sites use frames or tables, which while not blocking crawlers,
wind up confusing search engine users. For instance, when
a frames page is indexed, each window is indexed separately, so someone
finding a match and clicking on it will be presented
with that window alone, out of context. And when pages dependent on
tables are indexed, the words are interpreted as
appearing in sequential order, left to right, instead of associated
by columns and rows. As a result, phrases get jumbled.
When companies realize that their pages are poorly represented or not
at all represented in search engine indexes, they typically
target the symptoms rather than the cause of the problem. They'll
set measurable goals that are irrelevant to their true business
needs -- such as "ranking" for specific key words -- and then hire
experts who try to trick search engines into delivering those
the desired results. In the process, the "experts" may break
the rules that search engines have set up to try to keep their
indexes truly useful, and thereby get the company's pages completely
thrown out. In any case, the experts typically have their
hands tied -- they are unable to add new useful content to the site
and are unable to change the site's basic design.
Today's search engines index every word on every page. And many search
engine users enter multi-word queries. So
the more useful text you have on your pages, the more likely it is
that searchers who want your kind of information will find you.
Instead of spending time and money generating key word metatags, you
should add more and more useful content to your site.
Keywords only matter for advertising -- search engines will sell you
ad space on pages generated when certain words appear
in the query. But for actual searching, keywords are meaningless. Put
your effort into generating more good content.
Also don't waste your time with key-word position checkers -- programs,
like WebPosition Gold that tell you how your whole
site or particular pages rank for particular queries. Such programs
bang away repeatedly and automatically at search engines,
adding an enormous load to those systems and hence slowing response
time for actual users and forcing the search engines to
invest more to keep performance at acceptable levels. While the results
you get from such programs might make you look good to your boss, they
mean little or nothing in terms of how much traffic your pages are likely
to get by way of search engines. For
traffic, you need content, and lots of it.
Since search engines index every word on every page they find, the more
useful text you have at your site, the more likely your
pages will be found by people who are interested in them. This is a
random game -- the more content you have, the more dice
you throw, so the more likely you'll win.
Focus on building content, not on trying to trick search engines.
Large pages are more valuable than short ones -- large in terms of text, not graphics. Graphics are useless for search engines.
For maximum effectiveness, you need plain static HTML pages (not ASP pages), without frames or tables or java applets.
The most important text should appear at the top of the page. In fact,
the first couple of lines of text should make sense as a
description of the page.
And the HTML title (not the file name, and not the headline that appears
on the page, but rather the title in the HTML header)
should be carefully written to mention everything that is important
about the page, in very few words. That title will appear in
search engine results lists as the words that are linked to your page.
And words that appear in HTML titles are typically given
very high priority by search engines -- in other words if two pages
match a given query and one of those pages has the query
words in the HTML title, that is the page that will appear on top.
These static pages can have static graphic images (jpg or gif), if you
like. Such images will not help you with search engines, but
won't hurt you either -- so long as none of the text is embedded in
images.
So, I told my friend, forget about key words. Instead, focus on generating content -- text that is useful to your customers.
(For a full-blown treatment of these ideas, see www.samizdat.com/brandandtraffic.html)
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
Web
Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs,
and professionals by Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002).
No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve
online business success.
Reviews.
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
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