How Search Engines Work
Search engine optimization is one of the most cost-effective ways to drive targeted traffic to your website. This means that, as a business owner, its important to know how these search engines actually work and how they present information to the user initiating a search.
They use programs called ‘spiders’ to index websites. This spider is an automated program that crawls a website, reads the content on the it and follows the links that the site connects to. The spider then returns all that information back to a central depository where the data is indexed. It will visit each link listed on the website and index those sites as well. Some spiders will only index a certain number of pages on your site, so its not recommended to have a website with more than 500 pages.
Increasing Your Online Traffic
A website without traffic is like a city without people. It is wasted, as the sole purpose for it being created was for others to use it. Therefore, you need to spend as least as much time building access routes to your website, just like roads are built to a city, as you spend on the design of it, and the content for it.
You probably already know about the general methods of getting people to visit your website, so only a brief mention will be given to them here. Essentially, all traffic come from one of these three sources…
The Architecture of a Website
Website architecture refers to the specific design and layout of the web pages on a given website. There are some things that should be considered for both a visitor point of view, and a search engine point of view.
It’s important to have a web design that is appealing to the human eye so that visitors stay a while and come back often. The problem is that often what is appealing to the human eye is not so appealing to Google’s algorithm. This can create problems when it comes to getting the web pages to rank well in the search engines.
Google looks at text when it visits each web page. It doesn’t “see” images and it doesn’t view videos. It sees text content on the page and in the code of the page – not much else. Websites that make heavy use of such things as Flash and javascripts often have trouble getting a high ranking from Google.
Javascripts
Lately Google is starting to get a better handle on java, so its use is becoming more acceptable as long as it’s placed correctly within the code of the page. For example, javascripts should be placed in a file that resides in the root directory of the server. Then the coding on the page should refer to the file in order to call up the script.
A Good Visitor Experience Is Important
Most small business owners have a website. Many think they need a website just because everyone else has one. Well, that’s not exactly a solid internet marketing strategy. After all, a website that doesn’t generate visitors that result in sales is not doing its job.
The objective of your business website should not only be to drive more traffic to it, but also to enhance each visitor’s experience while they are there. After that, it should also give them enough reason to return again and again.
Constructing A Website That Works
Before you even consider starting to build a new website, you need to think very carefully about exactly what you are going to include on it. It’s very important to find your niche and focus all your content on it. As you can imagine, a visitor or potential customer will not want to wade through fishing tackle supplies when they came to your site looking for luggage. Even more importantly, the search engines won’t be able to distinguish what it is you are trying to sell and therefore won’t be able to rank it well for any of your products. The more products you have on your site means that they have to compete with each other to be viewed when what you really want is a fewer amount of related products that complement and enhance each other.
Here is a basic list of things that you must consider when creating your website.
