Production Animal
Production Animal
2527 Johnson Dr,
Lynn Haven, FL
(850) 348-1541
Chances are you've received an email from some company stating that for a certain price, they will submit you to a X amount of search engines. These offers always make us laugh for two reasons. The first thing that occurs to us is that there are not X search engines out there anymore. There are two. It takes us about five minutes to submit you to Yahoo! and Google, and most of the time, submission-wise, this is all it takes. So why are they offering to submit your site to X amount of engines if there are only two?
Because back in the day, there were hundreds. But now most of those search engines have turned to Yahoo! or Google for their results. If you look closely at your searches, and you are doing them on other 'engines', a lot of the time you will see something like "powered by Google (or Yahoo!)".
So why do you get these offers? They are assuming you don't know what we know. We're not saying Google and Yahoo! are the only true search engines left, just that they are the only super engines left. Though others like Overture and Ask will try, it's a little late in the game to expect them ever to have the indexes that Google or Yahoo! do.
The other reason these offers make us laugh is that they expect you to believe that just by submitting your site to these engines, that you will have done all you need to skyrocket to the top of all your relevent searches. Not true by a long shot. So let us tell you a little of what we know so you can decide how you want to approach "The Game," as we like to call it.
It is a game. Every four to six weeks, Yahoo! and Google will come around and look at your site. The terms "crawl" or "spider" or "scan" have long been used to describe this process. In reality, the search engines deploy a sophisticated software to take a look at your site. As long as you keep updating on a monthly basis, the engines will come around on that same schedule, sometimes even more often than the 4-6 weeks. But if you don't maintain your site, the engines will stop coming around so often and can take up to three months to return. The advantage to having them come around more often is that every time they are done crawling your site, you have a new chance to be placed in new categories and to be re-ranked within those categories. In other words, you have a better chance to get to the top.
Every six months or so, Yahoo! and Google update their spider software. Each time it looks at your site, it has a criteria of what it is looking for. We, as web designers, know about half these things. Think about it. If we knew everything, we could manipulate that software thus making the engines no longer fair. The reason so many people use the free index of Yahoo! and Google is because it's a completely unbiased list of results. If we could manipulate those results, the search engines would become worthless and corrupt.
So they change this agenda every six months. Some of the things they tell us to do change and some of the secret things change. Its up to the person maintaining your site to know and keep up with the changing trends of this agenda.
Thus anyone telling you they can 'guarantee' you results on the search engines is either fooling themselves or fooling you. The only way to guarantee you will come up on the first page of any search is to pay for 'sponsored links'. On Yahoo! and Google, these results are always displayed in the right-hand column of the page and announce themselves as sponsored, letting you know that they paid to be there and aren't necessarily a good match for your search. As a result, most people who use the engines regularly know all of this and only click on those links as a last chance to find what they were looking for. Paying for results is never as profitable as getting to the top of the free index.
So how do people do it? How do they get to the top and what are the things we know will help? You have to play the game.
Content will always be king. Rich, informative and to-the-point text on your website allows the search engines to understand what it is you do and the more you have, the better it can place you. Sales fluff like "we're the best" and "we're number one" won't do. Search engines are looking for concrete information. The more information, the more categories you can fit into and the better that information, the higher you go in those categories. Why do people use search engines? To find information. Without informative copy on your site, you're never going to get high in the index.
There are several 'tags', or hints, you can place in the code of your site to help search engines place your site better. Some are META tags. Most people have heard this term before, but basically there are several, not the least of which are your title, keyword and description tags. These tags give the search engine software a 'heads up' when it first enters your site. These tags say to the search engines, "This is what my site is about." Then the engine moves down into the content of your site to verify and match up those tags with your copy. The more these are in unison, the better the play you will get with the engines.
How do you decide which keywords or keyphrases to use? Production Animal always recommends that you sit at your computer and pretend you are one of your potential customers. What keyphrases might they use to find you? What words say the most about what you do? Make a list and give it to us before we begin your website. It will help us get you where you need to be because, again, no one knows your business (or customers) like you do.
So what else matters? Professional website design for one. It's very important that the code is clean and readable for the search engine, something most amateurs don't realize or can even overcome. Layout and image tags are important to the engines as well as knowing how to set up a website so that it can be built upon in the future instead of having to tear it down and replace it every year.
Research. Knowing what categories to go after in the index. Some of the obvious ones are so convoluted that the time spent trying to overtake that category could be better spent going after three other lesser categories that yield the same ultimate result. The engines can only place so many sites on that front page of any search and about a million new websites hit the internet every day. Things that worked a year ago will no longer work so keeping up on the search engine trends is key. Every six months the criteria changes so if you keep doing the same things year after year, before you know it you are way behind the curve. There are many other things that matter when it comes to search engine optimization, however that's our job.
All you need to decide is what do you want your website to do for you?
Do you just want a site because nowadays every business has one, or do you need it to bring you more business? Because if the latter is true, you will need to get used to the reality that you will have to play The Game. It means uncertainty, no guarantees and a monthy investment. If you think it about it, its not different from other media in that it does require more upkeep, but the same in that it is usually a monthly expense. Its no different that way. It used to be, you could make a site and if you included a few tricks, you could get to the top of searches easy and do nothing to your site for months, even years, and it would stay there. This is just not so anymore. With the number of sites on and coming on the internet every day, its almost impossible to get there quick and even harder to stay there once you are there. Reality says the work you do now on your website will effect it for the next three months. However, if you are one of those people that don't care about the engines, then maintenance isn't an issue unless you want a change made to the site. On that note, let's move on to maintenance.
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