search engines_
One of the greatest challenges for website owners is educating the public that their website actually exists. Due to the sheer size of the Internet as an information resource, and maybe also due to a limited marketing/advertising budget, ensuring that your website is found before your competitor's website can be a difficult and onerous task.
In general, a user may visit your website in one of three ways. They may:
- learn of your website's address through advertising (television, newspaper, poster, flyer, etc);
- guess the address of your website based on your business name (another reason why registering a distinctive domain name is important); or
- access your website by clicking on a hyperlink contained in a search engine hit list.
Especially in relation to lesser known businesses, it is arguable that search engines provide the most common means by which users find websites. As a result, many website designers have developed techniques (some legal, some illegal) to manipulate search engines in an effort to place their website at the top of hit lists. The most controversial techniques in recent years have been "meta tag abuse" and "stealthing".
meta tags_
Meta tags are contained in a website's source HTML file and may contain a description or keywords relevant to that website. These meta tags were historically viewed automatically by search engine "robots" in order to process and determine the content of a particular website. You can view the meta tags embedded in any website by clicking on "Source" in the "View" menu of your browser. If you look at the meta tags embedded in this website, you will see keywords like, "bazwill ink.", "online design", "website design", "web design", "Australia", "Sydney", etc. All these generic words are relevant to the content of this website, and thus may be helpful to search engine robots when they analyse the website.
Controversy arose when website designers began to insert irrelevant words or phrases into their website's meta tags. For example, it would be unethical if bazwill ink.™ was to insert words like, "Nike", "Coke", "Panadol", "Fender", etc. into its meta tags because these words have nothing to do with the business of online design. Of course, if we had designed the Coca-Cola Company's website, the insertion of "Coke" in our meta tags would probably be permissible. This issue is one of common sense: if the words are relevant, use them in your meta tags. If they are irrelevant, don't use them in your meta tags.
While meta tags continue to be used by website designers in 2004, their ability to manipulate search engine hit lists has waned due to improvements in search engine technologies. For example, Google no longer exclusively depends on meta tags for information about websites. It now assesses the full-text content of each website, and also ranks each website according to how many times other websites hyperlink to it. These technologies have improved the integrity of Google's search results, and helped make it the best search engine in today's market.
stealthing_
In order to take advantage of search engines that employ full-text website searches, some website owners have inserted popular or generic words into the body of their website in the same colour as the website's background colour. In this way, the offending words remain invisible to users (unless the offending text is selected or printed) but remain visible to search engine robots. This practice, commonly known as "stealthing", is the modern day version of meta tag abuse, and is equally unethical.
In the past few years, website designers have been prosecuted and fined for stealthing and meta tag abuse in relation to words that are identical to trade marks. Those that are interested in this area of Internet law may like to read a thesis on meta tag abuse recently completed by Barry Sharkey.
search engine optimisation_
There is no precise science to obtaining a high relevancy ranking on search engines like Google. A lot depends on how long your website has been in existence, how often it is updated, whether you have submitted it to be reviewed by a search engine's robot, and of course the search techniques employed by the individual user. While there are a number of techniques that help search engines to find your website (like clear titles and comprehensive meta tags), the best advice is to be patient and let the search engines' robots do their job. It may take a little while, but eventually the robots will find your website and add it to their data records. We have found that Google lists new websites within one month.
Of course, if you are really serious, you can spend lots of money on search engine optimisation. Many companies, like BMC Optimise, offer this kind of service. As a cost effective alternative, we recommend that you download the new ebook authored by Steve Szasz. This ebook contains very useful and easy to understand information about search engine optimisation.
bazwill ink.™ employs the latest tehniques to ensure that the websites we design are successfully listed by Google. Try it yourself - type "bazwill ink" into Google and review the results.
