How Do I Get My Website on Search Engines
Search Engines, such as Google, play an important part in getting your small business website noticed. The good news is that small websites have an equal chance of high ranking in the “natural” search results, against big business. The bad news is that those same big players have more knowledge, staff and resources to throw at getting top search engine rankings. But Chew Valley Web always brings you top quality articles that help your small business website so here goes…
“How do I get my website on those search engines?”
“Natural search” is the name given the non commercial website listings that appear in the main body of a search. Not the paid links, sponsored results and other stuff around the edge. “Natural Search” is free search engine rankings that you should care about. It doesn’t cost you anything.
Search Engines have to provide good quality, unpaid search results so that web users trust their results. If, everytime you searched for something you just saw adverts, you would not be a satisfied search engine user. The search engines must keep providing searchers with what they want - to find the website or webpage they are looking for. Google orginally became popular because it’s search results were more relevant and useful than other search engines. They still are today.
So, to help you get on search engines and for customers to find your website you just need to make sure that you provide what they are looking for.
“How do the search engines know if my website is the relevant to the search?”
Lesson 1 : If my website doesn’t have good text content, it will not do as well in search results.
This includes websites built entirely in Flash or that rely on images, graphics or other “non-texty” communication that only a human eye can read.
As search engines provide results for real people, they try to see your website as a web user would. The easiest part of a webpage for an automated “web crawler” to interpret is text - real html text. It reads the text and uses complex calculations to decide what your website is about.
Lesson 2: If a search engine can’t find my site, it won’t appear in search results.
Because webcrawlers are automated web browsing machines, they can’t just type your web address into a browser. Although you can submit your website URL to the search engines, they will find it quicker by following links from other sites that it already crawls.
Lesson 3: The search engines try to work out if my website is important to a search.
One way for a automated web crawler to work out what real web users think of your website is links coming to it from other websites. Called “backlinks” these are like votes of confidence for your website, used to help calculate your search ranking and relevance to a particular search. More backlinks from “quality” sites mean more votes for you and more recognition by the search engines.
So, is that all I have to know to get my website on the search engines?
Search Engine Optimisation is a bit more complex than that and is changing all the time. Search engines like Google are constantly trying to improve the quality of their “natural search” results and we are always looking for new ways to get a website to the number 1 spot. Chew Valley Web has a series of articles sharing details of getting more free web visitors using the search engines.
But the basics of getting your site on the search engines never change, think like an automated web user and you won’t go far wrong.
