web sites for the small business

Keywords are the terms used to describe, and search for, your web site. They are placed in special positions and also within the content of your pages. Imagine that you are a plumber based in Winchester. Keywords that you would want might include: plumber, plumbing, plumbing services, emergency call out, leak, drains, central heating, Winchester, Hampshire, towns within your area such as Eastleigh, Twyford, Sparsholt, Crawley, Kings Worthy or areas within Winchester such as Weeke and Harestock - you could probably think of more. You should then ensure that your site contains these keywords. A useful tool to help you see which similar terms are being searched for is the Google Keyword Tool

At the top of the page, invisible to users of the site, are the META tags. These include the title, description, and keywords tags. The keywords tag is becoming less important as it has been subject to abuse by web site designers and thus its weight has become less. Nevertheless, it is a useful place for your keywords. The title tag is used by the browser to display its title and thus should be short and readable - it is an important place for your keywords. The description tag is often used by search engines to display the text beneath the search result and so should be informative, contain your keywords, and be written to be readable by humans.

Other strong places for keywords are within heading tags such as the <H1> tag, image titles, and within links. In addition, they should be included in the actual content of the site.

Search engines are trying to find relevant sites. If the text within your site provides a good match to the search terms then to the search engine it should be a good match. However, the content shouldn't just be a conglomeration of keywords. Firstly, it would be difficult to read and, secondly it may look to the search engine as if there is a deliberate attempt to influence the ratings without actually having anything of value and thus it could well be penalised. A certain amount of content also indicates to the search engine that the site contains useful information.

An important point to note is that search engines find it difficult, if not impossible, to read text in images, flash, java applets, and javascript. Consideration to search engines should be given when using these and they should be used sparingly or with text alternatives.

Page links include links internal to your site and external to and from your site. In general they should all be all talking about the same topic. The link text should be descriptive - no "click here" links. Links in and out to sites in the same subject field will confirm that the site is about that subject. Good, descriptive, easy navigation within your site helps. Of course, links coming into your site from other pages will increase your site rating - especially from respected pages with high page rank in the same subject area.

Page rank is a numerical value calculated from the number of links that point to a page and weighted by the page rank of the pages that point to it. Thus, if lots of popular pages point to your page then the page will have a high page rank. It is used to indicate the popularity of the page but is not associated with any keywords. Effectively it is used to rank search results once all other factors are considered. Thus if you have two pages that score the same value for a particular search the one that is more popular will be scored higher.

Search engines are continually crawling the web looking for new sites to index and re-indexing old sites. They should eventually find your site. Nevertheless, submitting the site to search engines in a format that they understand will make the process simpler and will speed things up.

Directory listings are important. They often have high page rank and high relevance. Many, such as Yahoo are paid for. Others, especially trade directories, can be free. Your site should definitely be submitted to the relevant local trade directories.