Making Your Home Page Search Engine Friendly
In this article we are going to look at some simple steps that you can take with the Decentrix Website solution that will make your website home page more interesting and understandable to search engines.
Although you want to be ranked highly by search engines, much of the information available on search engine ranking is complex and difficult to understand. In this article we will give you some simple to understand steps that will improve the way your home page is found by search engines.
Generally speaking your visibility on the web search engines is driven by three factors:
- Submitting your website to the search engines. Your site will be invisable to search engines unless you submit it to them. See the Promote Your Website article.
- Links to your domain name from other sites (or pages within your site) and the quality and relevance of those links
- The language and clearness in the content of your home page and the way this relates to the page title, title tag, keywords and description for that page.
In this article we are only going to discuss the third of these factors, we will cover link strategies in a future issue.
In the Decentrix technology we have a very powerful and simple to use page editor. Although we have provided rich content that is relevant to your business, there will be descriptions about product offerings and services for your business that you may want to add to your home page to make it more relevant to what you provide and where you are located.
Start with Your Business Description first
Work on a number of paragraphs that describe your business that can be inserted at the top of your home page. The description should include the keywords that you want to be found by. Typically it is wise to repeat those keywords two or three times throughout the text. However remember to make the language sensible and readable. Simply repeating keywords is generally considered spamming by search engines. How do you know what keyword terms to use? There are a number of free tools that allow you find the relevant keywords for your products.
Keywords
Let's use the Overture keyword tools and look at keywords for a satellite dish retailer. Go to: http://www.content.overture.com/d/USm/ac/index.jhtml and look to the right hand side of the page for "tools". Select "Search Term Selection Tool". A popup window will open allowing you to put in a term. Enter "satellite" and the tool will provide you with relevant terms and the count in Overture for the use of that term. Some of these terms have very high search usage but these may not be the best terms for you to utilize if you want to position your website uniquely.
Why is that? Well lets look at "satellite tv" as a search term. Using http://www.google.com/ if we can search on "satellite tv". we will find that there are approximately 7,200,000 hits (meaning the number of references to this search team that google has indexed) for this search term. So what is your probability of being able to drive your website to page 1 of Google? Unfortunately, the answer is "almost impossible", unless you are prepared to spend a great deal of money!
So it would be wise to select keywords that are less frequently used and attempt to make those words more important in your text and as a result make your home page more visible to search engines for those keywords.
Steps to Edit your Website Home Page
Log into your intranet and select "Click here to edit and maintain your Web site" button. Select the "Edit" Tab. Select the Home Page in the site navigation on the left of the page.
In the Advanced mode, select an insert point "I" at the top of the home page and select "Insert text". A box will open that will allow you to enter your custom paragraphs. When finished, save the text. You will now see the new content displayed on your home page.
Next select the home page icon in the site navigation to the left and select "Page keywords" from the dropdown menu.
In the "Title Tag" box enter 5 to 7 words describing the page and try to use 2 or 3 keywords if possible.
In the "Search Keywords" box enter the keyword phrases that you want the search engines to identify. These keyword phrases should be 2 or 3 words and should be the same phrases that are found in the text description for your business that you entered on the home page (note that we may have already populated this box with some common keyword terms you can choose to leave them or remove them). Separate keyword phrases with a comma and a space.
In the "Description" box enter 3 to 4 lines of description (but no more) that you would like to see displayed in the search engine results when a keyword search is done. Once again this description should have 2 to 3 of the keyword phrases that are highlighted in the boxes above.
Click "OK" to save the data and then publish your site.
That's it!
Next submit your site to the engines using the links that we have provided elsewhere in this newsletter.
And remember if you have forgotten how to edit your site our support people are just a phone call away. 303-899-4000 ext. 1
