How the Search Engines Work

I include this article so that you can understand how the search engines work and do not get discouraged if your website is not ranking. To rank your website takes time and effort. In other words, time and labour, and those two things translate into money.

You can expect to pay in effort and time anywhere from R500 - R50 000 for your "free" search engine traffic, but heck, if and when you get those "free" search engine rankings, boy does it pay well!

I will try and keep with the basics here and try not to get too advanced so you just understand the basics at least and then when I create your website for you, you will understand some of the things that I do and recommend.

Remember, I approach your site like it is one of my own and will not advise or recommend anything that I would not do for my own websites.

Search engines basically look at 2 factors, On Page factors and Off Page factors when determining how to rank your website.

On Page Factors

The first thing is that your website has to be designed with both search engines and people in mind and very often this is comes down to being the same thing. You need good quality content in the form of text so the search engines can analyze what your website is about and index you accordingly. NO, GOOGLE DOES NOT AUTOMATICALLY KNOW YOUR WEBSITE EXISTS. It needs to be indexed, you need to report your website to Google so It will know that it exists. It' is like listing your telephone number in the telephone directory, you have to let Google know that your new website has just been created.

There are a number of things that goes into creating a good Search Engine Friendly and people friendly website. First and fore most you will have to identify the keywords that people use to search for your particular products and services and incorporate them into your website. I do this when I design your website for you.

Then you have to write quality content in text that is original and consists out of 350 - 900 words, ideally around the 500 - 700 word mark. It is the INFORMATION HIGHWAY and Google is looking for websites that are adding to the information base of it's index. If your page has no text on it or only one paragraph, Google is not going to take your page seriously in terms of providing quality information. Incidentally, people also want good quality information and the more you can supply, the more they will feel empowered to deal with you.

Search engines also LOVE fresh and new content to be added to your website regularly. This shows them that your website is actively providing new industry specific information and is adding to the Internet's knowledge base.

The search engines make use of a robot script called a "spider" to visit your website daily and check your website's content and index it accordingly. If you can offer new and fresh content to the "spider" every time they visit your website, you will entice it to visit more often. This fresh content means your website is being updated and added onto.

The websites with the most search engine spider activity wins! The more they crawl your website the more the search engines will love your site and give it higher priority. This crawl activity is not just achieved through website content, but also through off page factors such as links as well.

Off course your website should also be technically correct with no coding errors and search engine friendly structure and HTML coding. I build this into your website when I design it.

So the first order of business is to design and construct the website to be search engine friendly.

Factors that need to be addressed to ensure your website is search engine friendly include ;

Domain Name
Correct Page Names
Correct title tags For Chosen Keywords
Properly researched keywords, used in the correct ratio
Proper description tags
Correct keyword rich text on every page
Loading time
Clear navigation structure for the spiders to follow
Site design (make sure your site is standards compliant and that it is not constructed in frames)
Good quality, original text in the 350 - 900 word range.
Off Page Factors

The biggest part of ranking well on the major engines has nothing to do with your website itself. It depends on outside elements or "Off Page Factors" as we talk about in the industry.

The most important of these is to have as many quality, relevant incoming links from other websites to your website with your keywords in the anchor text.

What is a link? This Is A Link To The Marketing Page Of My Website

For every link like the one above that you receive from another website other than your own that is relevant to your industry / website topic, you will receive a vote of confidence from the search engines. Every vote helps to establish your website as an "authority" on your topic and will help to rank your website higher accordingly.

For every website other than my own (but not limited to just others, internal links count also) that links to my website with the words "website designer" in it, tells Google that my website is about a "website designer" and is a vote for my site for those keywords.

If 1000 websites all want to rank #1 for the same keyword and all of them have good information about the topic written on it's pages, how does Google determine which one is the MOST relevant and should be placed at # 1? Google counts the links as "votes" that you receive from other websites and the one with the best and most votes win.

Getting those links or "votes" is typically done through a reciprocal link exchange where you exchange links with other websites in your industry or related industries and getting one way links from internet directories. You can also obtain these links from articles submission and blogs that are writing about your website or are that are referencing your website.

There are numerous ways of getting these "links" from other websites, and a whole bunch of these techniques can be initiated and controlled by you via making use of my website marketing services.

Side Note : I cannot over emphasize the importance of incoming links. I have seen websites with nothing other than 1000's of links rank in the search engines for their chosen keyword. In some cases it is THE ONLY factor that allows a website to rank well. In my experience, having good quality incoming links is almost 70% of the success of high rankings.

Finding those link partners and directories and exchanging links with them is a full time job, and depending on how competitive your keyword is, you could need thousands of links just to rank on the first page.

I can tell you from experience if you want to rank on the first page for something as competitive as "cape town accommodation" you will need a lot of links, patience, time and elbow grease...

Sadly this is where most website owners fail. You need BOTH on page factors such as search engine friendly website design, fresh content AND off page factors such as relevant links to your website from other websites to have any chance of ranking highly in the natural search listings.