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Posted: Wed, July 18, 2007
Web Clinic - How to develop a website for different search enginesWhile Google is arguably the best known and most highly used search engine, it's not the only one people depend upon. Each search engine uses a range of different criteria and search algorithms when producing responses to search terms. So just how do you develop a website to take advantage of the criteria used by different search engines? Or should you just stick to the most popular and hope that the rest will eventually follow suit? In this month's Web Clinic, David Rhys Morgan, Technical Director of Spin Dogs addresses the problem, and gives us his advice to itwales.com. by David Rhys Morgan When we advise our clients about search engines, we tend to focus on Google. Not only does Google have a stranglehold on the market, but they are also often market leaders when it comes to supporting new technology and rewarding good coding practices.
Our own website receives on average 150 - 200 unique visitors per day from Google, yet we have had less than 300 hits from MSN or Yahoo in the last year! Although some of this can be put down to Yahoo / MSN targeting more casual users it illustrates the huge market lead Google currently enjoys. The criteria are relatively similar across most search engines. A good clean structure and good coding techniques ensure your website is easily indexed and will mean that your website has every opportunity of being ranked well in the search engines. It is worth making sure that your website is written with valid HTML / XHTML and CSS, as not only does this help search engines index your website, but also helps with the accessibility of your website.
Having good page names is also a simple trick to improve the individual rankings of each page, gone are the days when websites had to have URLs which looked like some scary maths formula mysite.co.uk/content.asp?id=5142&page=4&article=241 with technologies such as Mod Rewrite it is possible to have content management solutions that can provide Search Engine Friendly URLs such as mysite.co.uk/website-design/. The final and perhaps most important part of achieving high rankings in all Search Engines is to get as many good quality and relevant incoming links to your website. The web is a large place, gone are the days when just having a website was enough to guarantee traffic - the more people linking to your website the better. It is especially recommended that you try to target links from websites within your industry or from websites with very high volume of visitors. Prepare yourself for the long haul; although a poorly optimised website can see a quick boost, achieving good rankings is an ongoing process requiring lots of time and effort. Good luck! About the author Send a comment about this article to editor@itwales.com. |
Achieving a good ranking in Google illustrates good Search Engine Marketing and good on
page Key Word optimisation which usually means you will be ranking well in the other major Search Engines such as MSN and Yahoo as well. 
Another good technique for good Search Engine results is to target your pages to specific
keywords. For example, rather than listing all of your company's services in a brief paragraph on a single page, put each service on its own page. This allows you to target the content on each page to
the specific service which, in turn, makes it much more obvious to the Search Engines exactly what each page is focussing on. |
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