5 Critical Things

That Can Make Your Site Invisible on the Internet

by Bill Treloar

If people search for your products or services on the Internet, that can be an important source of new customers for you. Someone searching for what you sell is already “sold”. They’re looking to buy. Where else can you find that kind of qualified sales lead?

Since most people give up on a search if they don’t find what they’re looking for in the first three pages of the search engine results, your web site needs to get ranked in the top three pages. And the higher, the better.

But there are five common characteristics that can relegate even the most attractive and compelling web site to the search engine hinterlands. Many gorgeous web sites show up on page 72 of the search engine results instead of on page 1 or 2 because they make one or more of the following five critical mistakes.

5 Critical Things You Need to Avoid

#1 Insufficient Content

Your web site needs to have at least 200 words of keyword-rich text per page. Search engines determine what your web page is about based on the words you use on the page. A page that is mostly product photos may be very meaningful to someone shopping for those items. But the search engines have no way to understand what’s in those pictures. Search engines need text content.

Your text needs to use the keywords that people will search for. If you’re an exterminator, and your site talks at length about “exterminators”, “pest exterminators”, “insect extermination”, and “rodent infestation”, the search engines will understand that your site is about those terms. But if someone searches for “pest control”, you won’t show up unless that phrase is used on your site, too.

#2 Frames

Frames is a technique that webmasters use to simplify their work and to help ensure a consistent appearance across all the pages of a web site. An outside “frame” for your page is designed that, for example, has a top border with site identification, logos, etc. It may have a left side border with links to the various pages on the site. And it may have a bottom border with contact information, a copyright statement, and links to things like a privacy statement.

In frames, the “meat” of the pages, where the real content is, is the area enclosed by those borders, and that’s the only part that changes as you go from page to page.

Search engines may have difficulty moving around in a framed site and may fail to add some pages to their listings. Pages that are missed this way will never show up in the search engine results when people search for your keywords.

A more important problem occurs when the content pages do show up in the search engine results pages. That’s because when a searcher clicks on the link in the search engine results, it brings them to the content page. Just the content page. That doesn’t include the outside frame where site identification appears and where the links are that are necessary to find your contact information or the page where they can place an order.

There are some techniques to overcome these problems, but the simplest solution is simply to avoid frames.

#3 Graphic Text

Because different visitors to your web site have different fonts installed on their computers, the only way to ensure that text on your web page looks exactly as you want it to – size, font, line breaks, etc. – is to include it in a graphic. And often such text looks really great.

Unfortunately, search engines can’t tell if that graphic says “REALLY Cheap Widgets” or if it’s a photo of your new puppy. Words in graphics are wasted on the search engines. In order to understand that your page is about really cheap widgets, they need to find those words in plain text on your page.

In a similar fashion, navigation buttons that include words can’t be read by the search engines. Keywords in links to pages on your site can help the search engines understand that those pages are relevant to those words. You ought to either replace your navigation buttons with plain text links to the pages on your site, or supplement them with a redundant set of plain text links somewhere else on your page.

#4 Dynamic Content

Dynamic web pages are most often found on e-commerce web sites with many pages featuring hundreds of products. Dynamic pages are constructed “on the fly” from a database of product information, and can often be identified by the presence of a “?” somewhere in the page address.

Dynamic pages are often ignored by the search engines for a number of technical reasons.

One solution to this dilemma is to create topical pages that aren’t dynamic. For example, you may sell many varieties of tabletop widgets and portable widgets. By creating a static page (a “normal” web page that’s not created by your database) for tabletop widgets and another for portable widgets, you can use your essential keywords on those pages and still link to your dynamic pages to display individual products. Your dynamic pages are unlikely to be seen by the search engines, but your static topical pages describing your selection of tabletop and portable widgets should.

#5 Insufficient Link Popularity

Almost all of the major search engines factor into their rankings some measure of the number and quality of other sites that link to yours. That’s a reflection of their belief that good web sites don’t link to other web sites that are worthless.

If lots of high quality sites link to your site, chances are that you have a better site than one without any incoming links. Of course, you might be comparing your well-established site to a brand new site no one knows about yet, but over time, it seems to work out that better sites have more incoming links. And all other things being equal, a site with lots of incoming links will be ranked higher by the search engines than a site with fewer links coming in. And a site with no incoming links may be dropped entirely from some search engines.

Try to obtain links from web sites that complement your web site but which don’t compete with you. Investigate directories that list web sites in your line of business. And be prepared to link back to those sites in return for a link from them to you.

Being Visible

If you avoid these 5 critical things, you can avoid being invisible on the web. Being visible on the web is the first step to being found on the web. You may still need search engine optimization to obtain rankings in the top three pages of searches on your important keywords, but first you need to make sure you’re not condemned to invisibility by these 5 critical problems.

Bill Treloar is president of Rank Magic in East Hanover, NJ, a consulting firm specializing in making Internet marketing and search engine optimization more efficient and cost effective. He can be reached at (973) 887-0778 or online at www.RankMagic.com.