Each and every day there are thousands of websites that are being created and domains being registered. With each day that passes surfers on the internet are relying more and more on the major search engines. Surfers go to the search engines and put in their keywords to find the sites that are relevant to what they are searching for. It is from here that they find, or do not find, the websites related to the keywords they entered into the search engine.

On the other side there are new ideas being brought into the website marketing strategy monthly. Most of this revolves around how a website is created for to maximize search engine optimization. This is where a designer will make sure that the site is not only beautiful and informational, but it also is coded correctly for the search engine robots that come around to the website to determine where to index the site in the search engine.

I am not for sure what side you are on, but it is best to know both sides so that you can determine if your website is a full functional search engine optimized site. These ideas are not tied to any particular industry as it relates to all websites. Having an idea of what your website should be doing for you in the search engines will help you in your pursuit of getting the exposure you are looking for from surfers of the internet.

Let’s go over some of the ways a website can, and should be, optimized for a better search engine placement. These are in no particular order of priority or importance.

Keywords

Having an idea of what keywords someone would be using that you want to visit your website is important to have. Keywords can be placed in different places in your web page to help a search engine robot have a better idea of your website content and relevance in particular searches. One place keywords are put is in the head of a web page. For those of you who do not know, this is important information for the web page that a visitor does not see. In the header of the site you can list keywords that instruct the robot on the relevance of the site. You list your keywords in the meta tag with a comma following each keyword. For example:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”horses, horse, horse sales, horses for sale, equine, equine sales, equine breeding, stallion breeding, horse breeding” />

Now if you did not take the time to properly put the correct keywords in here and instead you used dogs, cats, mice, pigs, you would not be helping the search engines have a better understanding of your site.

Website Title

In my opinion the title is the most important factor in getting better results from search engine visitors. With a properly titled title you can pursuade people to click on your result from their search engine search. It is one thing to do good with your keywords and get a good ranking, but if you do not have a good title that catches attention, you will find that people will go right by your listing. Some good ideas for a website title:

1. Use your farm name, stallion name, or your horse business name. This is important in that it tells someone who they are getting ready to visit.
2. Use your keywords in your title. Make up a sentence that can integrate your keywords or use your keywords with a comma in between just as you do in your keywords. To me, I think it is better to make a sentence that summarize you so that a person has a better idea of the site they are getting ready to visit.

Description

Another meta tag that is used in the header of the web page is the description tag. With this, you will add a short description of the website. When I say short, I think 1-2 sentences if plenty. Anymore and the search engine robot will not even use it, and sometimes can be knocked against you.

Headers

When a search engine robot comes to your site it does not have all day long to be there. So it will look for certain information and collect the information that is found. One of the places it looks for in your web page content is in the header tags. These are used for titles that can be above paragraphs. They are put in the <h1> – <h6> tags. So your header would say:

<h1>Horse Farm News</h1>

Search engines know to look inside these header tags and think that this information must be important. There are some other techniques to get better use of the header tags that we will not discuss here.

Content

It is wise to plan out your content before it is added to the website. When you are planning the content you should try to focus on using your keywords. Of course you want to find a happy medium between your keywords and content that is useful for someone who is reading it. It is one thing to get your keywords in there for the robots, but if it is not enjoyable to read, what is the point? Try to find someone who has good writting skills that can help you on this.

Folders

When you have a link that in a sub page to your website, put that page as a index page and put in a sub folder. Then name that sub folder with your keywords and phrases. So for example, you have a horse sales page for your Arabian horses You would save the page as index.html and put it in a sub folder. Then you would name the folder arabian-horses-for-sale. These folders help robots gather more information about your site and this tells them that the pages inside this folder are related to Arabian horses for sale.

Clean Code

Having a beautiful site is always a goal of all website owners. Be careful though that you watch the download time of your pages. If the code that runs the web page is not clean and easy to read, it could slow down the speed of the page load. Not only this but it is helpful for the robots that have to look in the code to find your content.

Image Alternates

Images that are displayed on a web page has an “alt” tag which stands for “alternate”. This is text that is used to explain what the image is for those who can not view the image. This is more code that a robot picks up on but is not seen by the viewer if the image is displayed. So if you had a horse with a picture in your horses for sale page, you could add alternate text to the picture. So for example, you would have something like this:

<img src=”yourimage.jpg” alt=”Arabian Horse For Sale” />

Be careful with this as you want to make sure that the “alt” text is helpful for those who are not able to see the picture.

Linking

Something you need to try to do outside of your own website is to connect with other sites and try to establish a link connection. This is where they will put your website link on their page. What works best here for website optimization is if you find sites that are high on the rankings of your keywords to establish this link with. Of course you will probably have to add a link on your site for them, but sometimes this is not the case.

Summary

Day after day the algorithms used by search engines is changing and getting more complicated. Staying on top of this is important and helpful in your search engine placings. Having a well designed site will help in making sure that the robots can gather as much important information as possible about your site to put you in the right place for surfers. This is only a short list of what the search engines look for when visiting your website. Do a search on one of the search engines to find more information or contact me and we can talk about optimizing your website today.

Rob

 Email To A Friend  |  Print This Page

Tags: equine web design, horse farm website, horse web design, horse web site redesign, Web Design —