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Risto Klint has done considerable
research on the subject of how to get the best search engine results for your Website. This is no small task and Risto has done what amounts to a Doctoral thesis on the subject.
The Xara Xone wishes to extend its
gratitude on the part of the Xara Community for this fine and generous article. —Editor
Let yourself be found on Google!
(The boring part of Web site design…)
©2002 Risto Klint - All rights reserved
Introduction.
 I will talk about Web page design, not about the
look and function of Web pages but what you can do to increase the possibility that people will find you. Yes, I will be talking about META tags, content and structure, and how to
coordinate all these things in order to get as good of a listing on search engines as your Web site's content deserves.
People that know what they talk about call it SEO, or search Engine
Optimization. Me, well, I'm not an expert – I'm just an obsessive compulsive when it comes to the little details that I actually have control over - or think I have control over…
SEO is not a science; to a large extent it is guess work and experience.
Search engines constantly adjust their algorithms for how they calculate the relevance of Web pages in relation to a search term. What is true one month
might not be as true the next, but one factor always remains the same: Content is King! (At least with Google.)
It seems that there are almost as many search engines as there are content
based Web sites out there, some search engines are bad and some are really bad. And then there is Google!
My little article will focus on Google because it is the most widely used search
engine and they do not list sponsored sites in their search results, which means that we little people actually have a chance of being listed well, and
therefore receive a decent, or even a staggering amount of traffic.
Many of the tips I will be presenting here will hold true for most search
engines, more or less. Essentially, if you optimize your content for Google you will do well with most search engines.
Again, I will be throwing out all the details that I can think of, which Google
and other search engines use (or could use) when matching Web pages to search queries.
A word of caution – I cannot make any guarantees that if you implement
these ideas you will get a great listing on Google. Heck, if you do something really wild, you can even get yourself penalized, or banned by Google! All this
to say, consider this article a starting point to expand your horizons, use your common sense, and implement any or all of this at your own risk!
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