If you own a commercial web site you probably hope that you will be ranked highly on the major search engines. There are simple steps you can take to improve your ranking. However, no one can guarantee a higher ranking to you. Your web designer can follow the correct steps, but the final result is beyond his or her control. Many marketing companies will offer to improve your ranking for a fee, but these are often empty promises. The following are some steps you and or your web designer can take
First decide on the keywords you want related to your site. These would be the words that the visitor would type into the search engine when they are looking for a business like yours. These key words might include the type of business you are in, the products you sell, or the location of your business.
The title of your web pages should reflect the name of your business as well as your target key words.
The headings in your web pages should repeat the key words. Of course repeating key words needlessly is frowned upon. If you are abusive in your redundancy, the search engines might black list your site and remove it from their data bases.
Your key words should logically be repeated in the text of your web pages.
All of your images should include an alt attribute to indicate what they are. This text will appear in browsers that can not download the image.
The Meta Tag - Description should contain a brief summary of your web site and your business.
The Meta Tag - Keywords should contain your target key words including any variations or common misspellings.
In theory, a site map page will help the search engines to 'crawl' your page with their 'spiders' or 'robots'.
You can create a crawler page and submit that to the search engines.
You can visit the major browsers and submit your site. The major search engines include Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos and Alta Vista. The search engines seem to be buying each other up so a definitive listing would be momentarily obsolete. When you submit your site you will be asked for key words or to place your web site in the appropriate category.
One factor that seems especially important to Google is the number of other sites with similar content that link to your site. You could ask other folks to link to your site in exchange for a link on your site. While you would not want a link of a competitor on your site, their might be businesses with similar customers that would be willing to join you on this.
While you can incorporate some of these elements into your site, it would be best to minimize their use.
It is kind of a crap shoot. I have some sites I designed that are indexed that I never intended to be indexed. I have one site that I deliberately designed to not be indexed, but it is. I have one site that I very much want to be indexed, but it is taking forever to work it's way up the ladder.
Good Luck, I hope this helps.
We are designing this site for several reasons. One of which is to allow small businesses to have a presence on the internet while still targetting a local customer base. Email us at findthebestlocal@comcast.net for more details.