Getting listed by Search Engines

Optimising your Website

Keep the following articles in mind to optimise your website for search engines:

• Maximise link popularity
  Search engines regard links as recommendation. Placing a link means to recommend the linked site.
  
  The amount of referring links is important. The more sites you have that link back to you, the higher your site will appear in the search results, however there is one main factor to consider with this strategy, and that's the credibility of the sites linking back to yours.

• Textual content
  Textual content is just what your visitors - and search engines! - get to see. Beneath pure text images, graphics and animations get transferred. In view of search engines the site should contain mainly text.
  
  Websites basically consisting of images or graphics only have a slight chance to get high rankings. Hold the same true for flash animated websites.
  
  Generally you can proceed on the assumption that search engines estimate if you have something to impart. Lenghty texts imply more competence. Google requites lenghty sites with a higher ranking.
  
  A desired search term also has to reappear again and again afterwards. But also not too often - as the site might be estimated as spam. As benchmark set 5% of the text. This means the search term appears about five times in a 100 words.
  
  The textual content is most important for a high ranking! Accordingly thorough should it be planed and put into action.

• Page title
  To search engines the title of a page is most important. It's the text that is used to form the link back to your site from the search engines, so it needs to include the keywords you want to rank for. Normally the user sees the page titel on top of the browser window.
  
  In Zeta Producer enter your page titel under tab "Extended" in field "Title".

• Headlines
  Pack important terms into headlines.
  
  In Zeta Producer the headline usually is the "Name" of a article.

• Start of text
  Put search terms that are important for you as far as possible in front of your content.
  

• Search term density
  The amount of the search term in the visible and entire text has a decisive share of the ranking position.
  

• Link text
  Enclosing search terms in links can have positive effects on rankings.

• Descirbing content with the URL
  The URL is the complete path to a website.
  Example: www.domain.com/directory/file.htm
  It consists of domain name, directory name and file name.
  
  Especially the domain name is high rated by many search engines. Inserting the search term into the directory and file name is also useful. The names can even consist of several terms that are separated through hyphens.

  Example: www.domain.com/term1-term2/term3-term4.htm
  
  In Zeta Producer you can insert this under "Folders" in the page properties.

• Provide a lot of content
  Google places websites containing lots of content/pages higher than smaller sites. So expand your site if necessary perhaps with a glossary, FAQ, more product description, articles, forum, etc.

• Read web statistics
  Most web hosts offer a statistical analysis of visits to your website. You can find out interesting things like how many visitors did come to my website? By which search term did visitors find my website? From which website did visitors come? Which browsers do they use? Which spiders (another word for search engines) passed by and how often? On which page of my website did visitors leave? This information often gives usefull hints for further optimisation - not only for search engines but human visitors as well.

• Page description
  Through page description website authors are able to offer an appealing abstract of the sites content. Many search engines use the page description as information about the website and display it as description text in the results. The description can contain up to approx. 200 characters and it should be written like normal text with full sentences, the use of capital and small inital letters and punctuation. It is advantageous if the same terms appear in content and description as these ones get better ranked.
  
  In Zeta Producer you find the page description under Website > Settings > Attributes as "description" or "meta-description". Here you can define the page descritpion globally. It will be inserted in every sinlge page afterwards. But it's better to give to every single page an explicitly matching description. You can do this under "Attributes" in the page properties.

• Keywords
  The Keywords are a listing in note form of the most important terms. They should be separated by comma, like e.g. "term 1,term 2,term 3, etc.". As guide number apply 20 keywords. The use of capital and small inital letters and alternative spelling should be considered. Multiple naming is redundant. Instead of that it's better to use combinations. A term, whether lone or in combination, should not occur more than three times otherwise it could be classified as spam.
  
  In Zeta Producer you find the keywords under Website > Settings > Attributes as "keywords" or "meta-keywords". Here you can define the keywords globally. But it's better to give to every single page an explicitly matching keywords. You can do this under "Attributes" in the page properties.