When Internet users are looking for a particular product, service, subject, or information pertaining to an area of interest to them, how do they do it? The most common research tool used is the search engine—85 percent of people doing research online use search engines to find what they are looking for.
Because search engines can bring significant volumes of traffic to your site, you must understand how the major search engines work and how the design of your site can influence the indexing of your site by the search engines. You must also know about the elements that are included in the search engines’ algorithms, or formulas, that are outside your Web site and what you can do to ensure that you earn maximum points for those things you can influence. Social media, for example, is significantly influencing search engine ranking.
When people conduct Internet searches, they rarely go beyond the first page of results. If you want to be noticed, ideally you want to appear on the top half of the front page of search results. Before you submit to the search engines, you have to be sure your site has been designed to be search engine friendly. In this chapter, we cover:
- The methodology to make your site search engine friendly
- How the search engines rank sites
- The key elements of Web site design to accommodate search engines
- The all-important content
- The importance of keywords in all aspects of your Web site
- The elements that are in the search engine algorithms or formulas that are outside your Web site
- The importance of link popularity and link relevancy to your search engine placement.