Circore’s Tips for Search Engine Optimization

Welcome to the wonderful, uncontrollable and unpredictable world of search engines. For the most part, you won't see your site showing up in the search engines for at least a few weeks after it has been placed into cyber space. It usually takes six weeks. The spiders (programs that read through sites and categorize them) have thousands of sites an hour to add. We always register the sites we create with some fun code to Google, which helps search engines to list you sooner than six weeks. If you had an old site and are replacing it with a new site, the listing where you showed up right away may be an older listing so it gets first dibs, so to speak. The longer your site is out there, the better it tends to do. You will also do better as you get more links to your site.

Your main page should have text that spells out key words you want searched. If you are a dental office, then the front page should have the word dental on it for example. While we have hidden keywords, titles on the pages, image descriptions and we register you with lots of keywords, sometimes just having a simple paragraph of text about you on the main page will give you a boost.

Maybe today you come up 6th on the page, tomorrow it might be 10th or 2nd. There is a lot of math involved in how search engines work. They look for best matches to what you have in the site. It is a mathematical match.

Swapping links with complementary businesses is a good way to up your placement in the search engines. Your name will come up higher depending upon how many other sites you trade links with or are referenced on other pages. Search engines look to see if your site is relevant and it measures relevancy by other sites referring to your site. Over time, your site will go higher or lower on the page based on how often the page is updated and how relevant it is. We have had clients who were high on the search engines at one time. Then they never update their site and they start to slide down. These other companies may be doing that. A lot is also influenced by your front page. If you have little text on the front page - it isn't going to come up very high as there is less for the search engine to match your most relevant page to. Search engines also look at headers.

Thank you Elaine, Circore’s webmistress for helping Denise with this article. For other tips visit http://www.circore.com/web.htm