OK, so you’ve gotten your site put together and you’ve submitted it to various search engines and the odd directory. In the case of human visitors, all you have to do is welcome them with a smile and let them have at it. But in the case of search engines, what do you have to do to make the site accessible to them?

Surprisingly little! I’m calling it “making a site search-engine friendly” instead of “SEO (Search Engine Optimization”, because the later is such a buzz-happy phrase. But really, that’s what we’re doing. SEO is a subject which, when Googled, will lead you to more misinformation than information. There’s more old-wives-tales, campfire stories, and flat-out fraud going on out there than there is truth.

Here’s the “straight dope” about SEO from four of the Big Five search engines themselves:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Ask
• MSN

For pity’s sake, first of all take a search engine’s word for it over how to do your site. Just from the above four links, we’ve already debunked a huge amount of search engine mythology out there. Bookmark them and read them, then start with some common sense and go from there.

In a nutshell, there are just two things that you have to do to ensure that all searches find every page of your site: (1) Make sure that every page on your website can be linked, through any number of intermediate links, from your site’s main page (properly named “index.html”). (2) Do NOT put any robots.txt or robots meta-tags restrictions anywhere. This includes files like .htaccess: make sure there’s no exclusions directed at robots in there or anywhere else.

That’s it! Every search engine crawler will now be able to index every page of your site! There are no magic spells or goats to sacrifice here. You do not need to pay some consultant thousands of dollars. You do not need to consult an astrology guide or chart the search engine founder’s biorhythms or try to manipulate the spiders through meta-tag voodoo or whatever amazing New Age Crystal Worship you find out there. I swear, SEO is a topic right up there with water dowsing and flying saucers in terms of what kind of bogus pseudoscience people will try to tell you.

Now then, let’s be sure that not only will spiders be able to find every page, but that they will be able to index your content in the most accurate and complete way possible, which is how you’ll get the most hits:

Think of web pages as having a “visible” and “invisible” aspect. The visible part is what you normally see. The invisible part is what you see if you view the source HTML of a web page.

For the invisible part, there are just two things to do to:

1. For SEO purposes, use just two meta tags; one for ‘description’ and one for ‘keywords’. Even these don’t count for much anymore; only one of the big five still even reads meta tags and that’s MSN. At the least, meta tags don’t hurt for any search engine, provided that you don’t try to cram the whole dictionary in there. The worst that will happen is that they are ignored. Remember that this is just for SEO purposes; go ahead and include the normal meta tags you would use to set content type, language, and etc.
2. Follow W3C standards as close as possible. Standards not only help all web browsers to render your page correctly, but help a search engine spider navigate your page as well. Check your page through that validator and fix it if it is broken. By “broken” I mean if there’s dozens of gross errors; a few minor bugs and warnings are normal in most cases. Too many errors may mean that search engine spiders will get lost trying to find your content.

By “follow standards”, we also mean following conventions: include a title for your section using the h1/h2/h3 header tags, use the title tag, use the ‘alt’ tag to describe images, etc. Learn your HTML tags, and produce your pages with clear, clean mark-up. You can’t go wrong that way!

For the visible part, there’s two even simpler things to do:

1. Have a good web page! If your visitors see everything, the search engines will too. Be sure to have enough textual content that the spiders will have something to digest; search engine spiders tend to ignore pages with only a few words on them.
2. Avoid Flash files, .pdf files, Microsoft Word documents, and other file formats that are normally not viewable in a web browser. That is to say, there’s nothing wrong with including a document in pdf from your page, but most search engines do not index the contents of that file format. Google only recently started doing this, and even then it prefers regular, ordinary HTML.

For another instance, a Flash intro may be dazzling, but the content within that intro will not be indexed. To get hits on a page, your only tool is text, text, and more text. if your page is a Flash game arcade, be sure to have a paragraph describing each game. caption images with a description. And so on.

In closing, try an experiment: use the search engines themselves to find pages that pop to the top for a given set of terms, then view the HTML source to see what they do. Do this over time, to ensure that the examples you like are consistent and it’s not just some goof who rigged his page with a bunch of tricks, only to get banned by Google two days after you saw it.

Happy webmastering!

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• Search Engine Study - part 3: The Great Search Engine Era
• Search Engine Study - part 1: Search Engines Defined

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