Findable Sites: Creating Websites For People and Search Engines
For Crying Out Loud: Don't Ignore the Title Tags!
Are you creating a site for a few people to use and that you do not want to show up in search engines like Google?
Ignore this site and continue on.
However, if you are providing information for the Web that you want people to find and use, start here! Increasingly, people are using tools to create dynamic Web sites, but these sites are not consistently findable. Search engines need to find Web sites before people can find Web sites.
FindableSites is a Web site creation service, focusing on content. I'll take design elements from your brochures, menus, et.c. and use those elements to create a simple, easy-to-maintain, easy to find Web site.
Web sites should be both findable and searchable. A findable Web site is anything that can be located by a search engine. Findable sites have Web pages that:
- Contain text
- Use descriptive titles
- Use meta tags properly
- Use heading tags to help organize information
- Use alt tags to label graphics
Content is the currency of search engines. Without real content (text), you won't have good search engine placement.
Many Web sites built from databases do produce text-based pages. The Internet Movie Database has static files that Web search engines can catalog. If you go to Google and search on "Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings," you'll see one of the first sites returned is the IMDB entry on Return of the King. Whenever you see a question mark (?) in a URL, that page has been generated by database. In the case of IMDB, this site makes its database searchable by search engines.
In addition to being findable by search engines, Web sites should have their own search engines. Atomz and Google both offer free site search engines. These site-specific searches are invaluable for the users trying to find information at your site.
And no matter how you generate your pages, always create a sitemap that's linked to every page. Always put the sitemap in HTML. A text-based sitemap is invaluable, for search engine spiders and for breathing users. Site maps are particularly invaluable to blind users as it helps them to reach other parts of your site more readily.
This Web site will contain help and show examples of invisible Web sites to help you understand why this is a problem. For now, take a look at a page I first wrote for the Web in 1996: Optimizing Your Web Page's Location in Search Engine Results.
Write to for a free consultation. I can provide fast, reliable turn-around on your SEO project or content development/maintenance project. Depending on the content of your site, I can usually improve your site's ranking in Google and other major search engines.