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Thursday, March 8, 2007

To Catch a Spider

You may be wondering what I'm talking about, so I'll let you in on the secret. It's a mysterious creature known as the Search Engine Spider. Until this morning, even I only had a vague awareness of what they actually do. Since I've recently been educated, I thought I'd pass on my knowledge.

So we are all (hopefully) aware that search engine spiders are the vehicle that gets you to the first page of Google, but what exactly are they? What do they see when they look at your website?

Your Friendly, Neighborhood Spider
A search engine spider is a cleverly written, always changing program that the various search engines send out to continuously look over website pages. The information that they come in contact with is then stored based on the ranking, relevancy and variables set by the different search engines. Not all spiders are created equal, though, and different engines have different criteria.

What They See
A spider really doesn't care for the design of your website. They want to go straight for the heart of it, the content. They are always searching for new information and have some definite dislikes:
  • Flash pages - a little judicious use of Flash is ok, but the spiders can't read anything on a website constructed entirely in Flash.
  • JavaScript
  • Text in Images
  • Dynamic pages - identified by #, &, ? and = in the url
Some Likes
What makes the spiders happy? A handful of things really get them excited.
  • TITLE tags
  • META tags
  • Heading tags
  • Relevant content with good keyword phrases
A few things to also consider when designing and optimizing a website: duplicate content, keywords, and pleasing design. Duplicate content is a huge hang-up that I run into. If you think you can get away with it, think again. You may be successful for a while, but eventually it will catch up to you. I've seen websites results slip slowly, plummet, or even be black-listed by search engines. And these spiders are getting smarter everyday. You used to be able to just stuff keywords and locations anywhere in a sentence and the spiders would be fine with that. Now, however, they can recognize that. You need to be thoughtful and careful about where you place your keywords; they need to flow with the rest of the content. Lastly, pleasing design. You aren't just out to impress the spiders, you have to think of the people that are viewing the website. You can be top dog on Google, but if you site is poorly designed, you won't get any business out of it.

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posted by Lindsay Phelps at 8:42 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

SEOverhaul

Is your website a few years old, maybe even more, and you're generally still happy with the design, but you're looking for ways to improve search engine results? Consider an SEOverhaul.

You can squeeze some more search engine juice out of an older site that's already been optimized and is performing at a decent result by giving it an overhaul to make its code more search engine friendly.

"If my site's only a few years old, why do I need it overhauled already?" you ask.

Website design is an ever-changing environment. The biggest offenders in website design of yester-year are table tags. Compared to the coding techniques used now, table tags are a clumsy and inefficient. They create clutter that the search engines have to stumble over in order to get to the content that they're really interested in.

We can recode your site so that the aesthetics don't change at all (unless you want to make some aesthetic updates at the same time), but the site is much more clean in code. We can also create new foot-holds for search engine optimization that may not have been there before. Depending on your site, we may even be able to recode it in such a way as to make website updates easier to make, and therefore less expensive.

Some things to consider when pondering an SEOverhaul:

Am I really happy with the design of my site, or does a complete redesign make more sense than a behind-the-scenes overhaul to the code?

Does my website have enough calls-to-action? If not, we should add them while making the overhaul.

Am I interested in a blog?

If this sounds like something you need, contact your account manager at Page 1 Solutions today!

Jonathan Fashbaugh
Account Manager
Page 1 Solutions

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posted by Jonathan Fashbaugh at 4:20 PM 0 comments