Search Engines | Are you Visible?

Keywords

This keyword cloud was generated by Wordle.net

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You have to admit, it is pretty impressive that with all the content out there on the world wide web, you can type in a phrase and get results in seconds.  And while each search engine works just a bit differently, most employ software robots--called spiders--to build lists of the words found on Web sites. Most spiders start on heavily used servers and very popular pages. (Thus the reason Wikipedia ranks so high on almost every subject!)  The spider begins with a site indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web. If your site isn't heavily linked to, you can also ask Google to add it to their index at http://www.google.com/addurl/.  Google spiders search out the words within the page prioritizing words occurring on the home page, in titles, subtitles, meta tags and other positions of importance. The Google spider is built to index every significant word on a page ignoring articles, conjunctions, etc.  (Note that each search engine takes a slightly different approach.) 

Probably one of the most important things to know when designing a site to be found by search engines is to understand how a search engine sees your site.  Here is a quick test:

1. Pull up your home page in a browser.
2. Move the mouse to an empty part of the page, right click and select "View Source." 

This is what the spider sees. If most of your text on the home page is graphic (ie. you have a flash or Joomla site) then there is a good chance your site contains only references to the graphics.  Since spiders read words, it sees nothing to index and moves on.  By adding a block of HTML text on your home page you give the spider something to index and can greatly improve your performance in search engines. (Again, remember the spiders count the information and links on the home page as the most important.)

Another component to analyze while in "view source" mode is your site's use of head tags (title, keywords and description).  The code you are looking for is <title> for the title of your page; <meta name= "keywords" along with whatever keywords you would like listed; and <meta name="description" with a sentence describing your church.  If that information doesn't exist, ask your web master to add it. (Most search engines will list your description verbiage for the site in the search so it is important to keep it current.)  If you are the web designer, where you edit your head tags (also called meta data)  will be different depending on which software you are using, but a quick search in the help section can turn it up quickly. 

Of course, the more traffic on your site--the higher the results.  So in addition to giving spiders the right words to index, you can also design a site that gives people reasons to visit again and again.  Which, is not nearly as simple a "fix."

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