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Driving Targeted Traffic To Your Web Site

What do search engines look for?

Before you submit your site, it important to understand what search engines will look for in your site and what will achieve a high ranking. Your overall aim as a webmaster is to get your site listed in the first ten to twenty results in each of the major search engines for each of the most important keyword combinations likely to drive traffic to your site.

Search engines index your site for keyword combinations in your documents. These can be taken from the TITLE or BODY of your document or from META tags embedded in the HEAD section. Each search engine uses a different approach so you should try to familiarise yourself with the methods used by each.

For most search engines, the most important factor in getting your site listed is the TITLE of the document, as in most cases this will be used as the heading for your site in the search results. Also important is the META description which is frequently used as the description for your page in the search results. For example:

In comparison, the META keywords statement in your document is now regarded to be of lesser importance, as it is thought that several search engines, most notably Altavista, now ignore this.

META keywords are however a useful way of listing synonyms and misspellings for commonly occurring words in your site. They should not however be used to list words that are not relevant to your site's content. The home page on 1^st Call for Weddings currently contains the following META tag:

Generally regarded to be of more importance than META keywords tags are the frequency and prominence of keywords in your document and the number of web sites linking to your site. Also, the use of keywords in your file names can help your site achieve a high ranking.

In our wedding example, the home page might look something like this:

How can you achieve a high ranking?