Optimise for Search Engines
Building a Search Engine Friendly Site
Creating a Search Engine friendly site is important especially for new business because this alone will help you to attract organic (natural) traffic. Traffic from Search Engines is also targeted since they are searching for something related to your site. This type of traffic is the most cost efficient because you do not need to pay anything for the ranking. All you need to do is to ensure that you create your site based on what Google stated in their Guidelines.
Official References
There are only two references that we would like to point you to. The first is the Google Webmaster Guidelines that illustrates the several concepts based on design & content, technical and quality. You can visit the Google Webmaster Guidelines here.
Another extremely useful reference is the Google SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Starter Guide, this guide contains useful information on how you can do technically to your site to improve search visibility. Topics discussed in this guide includes page titles, meta tags, site navigation, anchor text and many more. You can download a copy of the Google SEO Starter Guide here.
The Purpose of This Guide
Perhaps you will question why there is a need for this section if Google has released the above two guides for the Webmasters. We feel that it is also important not to lose the bigger picture of SEO when it comes to Search Engine visibility and hence, we have created this guide to provide a very simply overview to illustrate some key concepts that you should know. We have categorised the key elements into Indexable, Findabililty and Content.
Indexable
The first thing you should be aware of is site indexability. It is very important to allow your site to be indexed by the Search Engine bots in order for your site to be listed on the Search Engines. By default, a normal site will be indexed by the bots unless the site is blocked via robots.txt command or site authentication.
If your site requires authentication (user log-in etc) in order to view its content, the bots will not be allowed to view the content unless you make it possible for the first page to be available. You can read this post for more information on how to create a first click free behavior.
Findability
Once you are sure that your site is indexable by the bots, you can proceed to improve the findability of your site. The following are the two most recommended methods to inform all the Search Engines that your site is ready.
- Submit a Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools.
- Create text links on existing popular web pages to point to your new site.
The second method is the fastest especially if you can create a visible link to your site from any web page that has high authority. You can determine the page authority by checking out the Google PageRank of a web page. The higher is the Google PageRank, the higher is the authority level.
Once the Search Engines find a new link on the existing page, they will follow and index your site (and subsequently, your page) as well.
Content
The final element is to make sure that your content is fresh and stay up-to-date. Although relevancy is important, the freshness of the content is much more critical. Sites with time-sensitive content is very vulnerable to savvy visitors. A site with fresh content will start to attract more and more regular visitors and new visitors (from the search engines) at the same time.
This article is written by KC TAN. You may reprint this article only with a live link back to WebSprout Consulting.
