Do the search engines know what your site is about?

You need to ensure that the search engines are able to read what is on your page, there are a few things that will stop the search engines reading your content, the two main things that cause an issue with search engines not being able to see the text on your pages are frames and Flash elements.

You have probably seen flash elements on websites in the past, they are images that often run like small film or roll through a slide show type presentation that often includes text, unfortunately it treats the text as though it were an image and there for the search engines can not read the content.

Frames allow content from a different place to be included into a page this is often used by sites that do comparisons on prices where they draw in content from databases or for sites that do not want people to have to download the header graphic every time they go to a new page, unfortunately this causes the search engines some problems as what they see are 2 pages one with the navigation and the other with no navigation just content and it confuses them.

To get the most from your website it should conform to the W3C standards.

So how do you get found in the search engines?

Well with the search engines where you are found or your positioning is all important, it is estimated that Google find and index approximately 30 billion pages a year – that is around 6 new pages for every person on the planet – you need to be doing something special to be found amongst all the background noise, and this is where Search Engine Optimisation or SEO comes in.

Search engine optimisation is all about telling the search engines what a page on your website is about and suggesting to them the best way for them to index it.

If you were to look in the search engines for this website, you know it is called “be found or die” but that is all the information you have, putting this phrase into Google brings back an astounding 174,000,000 pages – obviously for a business such as ours it is important for us to be found at the top of that list (and we are) and it is SEO that enables us to do this.

We tell the search engines what the pages on our site are about and the search engine then includes them in the appropriate index, they have a scoring system to ensure that the most appropriate pages are delivered up to visitors for the various searches completed and this is what is known as the Google algorithm it is a scoring system that takes into account approximately 100 different factors to deliver the correct pages to the searcher.

I have been asked a number of times why we give away so much information and advice on Search engine optimisation on this blog and at our monthly seminars we have been accused of giving away the SEO secrets, but I feel this is a very short sighted view.

The more you make people think that Search Engine Optimisation is a secret and mysterious art the more you will build distrust and the more people will shy away from using it, and this is the oboist of what we as a business want and it is not going to be good for your business if you are not utilising the best SEO practices.

We offer seminars free of charge that explain in great detail how SEO can be used to get your site found in the search engines, we also have books on SEO and on-line marketing that we are happy to give you again at no charge there is the blog that will give you answers to lots of internet marketing questions and then of course there is the option to have us look over your site and produce the free of charge SEO report.

All this is designed to make sure that more people in business know about SEO and that they mystery of SEO and on-line marketing is removed and when the smoke and mirrors is removed you will see that what you are left with is a professional and dedicated SEO team that are here to promote your business in the search engines.