Custom Websites and SEO for Small Businesses on a Budget

Call or email us to inquire about setting up an Email Newsletter or Blog
1-877-866-GEEK

Girl Geek Speaks Newsletter

Welcome to the February 2004 Issue of our newsletter for the technically challenged and web site wannabe's. We feature articles to help guide you through the process of designing, building, and promoting your business or personal web site. If you know someone who may like getting these newsletters, feel free to forward it to them in its entirety, or have them sign up for their own copy below.

In my ongoing effort to dissuade small business owners and entrepreneurs from having their well intentioned relatives build their website for free, I offer this article on search engine ranking.

Your website designer needs to know way more than just how to use Dreamweaver or FrontPage site building software. They also need to know good design, marketing, search engine optimization and alittle bit about html coding. Plus, if you want an e-commerce site (where you sell products or services online) they’d need to know about integration of databases, merchant accounts and shopping carts.

Unless your dear relative is a professional web designer, hire competent help. You wouldn’t hire your brother-in-law the accountant to build your brick and mortar storefront if he’s only seen a hammer, would you?

In This Issue
Feature Article: The Care and Feeding of Search Engine Spiders
Ask Girl Geek: How Do I Know If My Site Will Feed the Spiders?

The Care and Feeding of Search Engine Spiders

For the novices out there, search engine spiders (sometimes called “robots” or “bots”) are the mathematical algorithms search engines (like Google), use to calculate and rank your website. To have any hopes of ranking well in search engines you need to attend to the “care and feeding” of the search engine spiders in the design of your site. Oh, and you need to make sure your web designers doesn’t try to “spam” them and get you banned forever from the search engines.

Here’s the top 4 things that will starve or kill the spiders (and then they won’t rank you site well).

Missing Content
Missing TEXT navigation
Missing links
Low hit rates
Now I will explain each--

Missing Content – Search engine spiders read your site linearly – from top to bottom and left to right. If your keyword-rich text isn’t near the top of your page, the spiders will die of starvation looking for it. If your text is “hidden” in frames, embedded tables or image files, it is basically invisible to the spiders.
Missing TEXT navigation – Search engine spiders gobble up sites with text navigation. They can’t read javascript, xtml, or dhtml fancy-schmancy menus. That’s why you feed them with a simple text navigation added to the bottom of each page of your site.
Missing links – Link popularity is one of the many ways to feed the spiders and rank well in the search engines. If you have many related and relevant sites linking back to your site, the spiders will assume you’re a tasty morsel (by virtue of being popular) and rank you well.
Low hit rates – A new twist to search engine ranking is on the horizon. Spiders are now becoming sophisticated enough to rank busier sites higher than sites who receive few visitors. This means you need to drive traffic to your site in as many ways as you can, not just rely on being found in a keyword search.

DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS:

The above material is copyrighted, but you may retransmit or distribute it as long as not a single word is changed, added, or deleted, including the contact information. However, you may not copy it to a web site. Copyright 2004. All rights reserved.

To receive our FREE email newsletter, Girl Geek Speaks, please send us your email address. Please review our privacy policy.