Search engines.. A websites friend or foe..The choice is yours

In a nutshell, when it comes to search engines..

CONTENT IS KING!

Ok, you have your website designed, it's now being hosted, it's been submitted to the big three search engines; GOOGLE, YAHOO, and MSN SEARCH.

You are now ready, you are going to be at number one on the search engine listings and thousands of people are going to start hitting your site and you are going to be a millionaire.

Sorry... it's not that easy

Search engines don't work that way, they are very intelligent entities that have been programmed to look at evey aspect of your site, and it's the search engine that will decide where you sit on the search engine rankings. With this in mind it's important the website designer to be implementing the required startegies to effect this. This is called SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION.

To explain i'll use Google as our search engine example. Google at present is the biggest search engine out there. Google at last count had over 8 billion web pages in it's search engine database and it's likely to the tune of 10 billion plus now and it's continually growing. So depending what your website is about, you may be competing with a mountain of other websites trying to sell the same thing who are also trying to be in the number one spot. If you are in a niche market or specific to a location then this competition decreases dramatically but there are still rules and regulations to follow to be in the search engines good favour. So let's begin..

Good Website Design

Good website design is one of the fundamental aspects of any website. Your website needs to look professional, not like something whipped up by a friend of a friend of a friend. There are many out of the box programs that allow you to create your own website but they are usually quite cheap looking and aren't made to be search engine friendly.

CONTENT IS KING... CONTENT IS KING... CONTENT IS KING... CONTENT IS KING...

I cannot stress this enough, CONTENT IS KING. Search engines love websites that have lots of useful information for the end user ie; your visitors, your potential clients. Gone are the days where your website was full of pretty photos and not much text. Google especially will rank you higher if your website has plenty of good quality content.

So think about what you want to say to your visitors and give then the information they need plus much more. Your content is one of the biggest factors for search engines when deciding where you will be placed in the rankings. Google's search engine algorithm is one of the most highly developed bits of programming software in the search engine world. Google is committed in providing the best possible search engines results whenever anyone types search criteria into their search engine. What this algorithm can do is amazing. The topics i have covered above are only the very tip of what Google and other search engines look for.

Provide plenty of good quality content and Google will love you

Good Linking Stategies

Links are another important aspect websites. Linking, or more to the point reciprocal linking is where you place a link from your website to another website and they return the favour by placing a link on their website pointing back to your website. This is called reciprocal linking.

Links are becoming less of a major factor now as links were used to drive site rankings up due to the amount of links some websites had. These websites didn't have a lot of useful content but had thousands of links coming into them from other websites which gave a false impression on the importance of the recieving website. Google is thought to have now implemented a links dampener in their algorithm to combat this practice and encourage more content.

In A Nutshell

Your website is an extension of your business and your advertising campaigns. Following some basic search engine rules will have your website performing well. Content is an important part of that but depending on what business you are in will govern how important your placement on a search will be to you. As i have said previously most businesses are local specific and you are concentrating your website for that area. In this case good keyword and title structure plus plenty of informative content should have you well placed on the search engines in time.