Google like all major search engines sends spiders and bots to crawl the internet and index the websites they find. I don't want to go into how search engine spiders work but you can read about it here, if you want to learn more. And you should because the more you understand about them the better you can optimize your website.
Until Google has indexed my website the only way people can find it is by knowing the URL to get to it directly or by finding a link to it somewhere else on the internet. However, most people find new websites by using search engines. So it behooves me to have as high a search engine ranking as possible.
Most people searching for something on Google will not browse past the second or third page of search results. So, my web page needs to be in that range. Hopefully, it will appear in the top 20 hits or first 2 pages, preferably it will appear in the top ten hits or the first page and, ideally, it will be number one. However, I'll settle for the first two pages of hits for now.
There are several things I have learned to apply to my website in order to optimize it for the search engines. First, is to choose a domain name that includes my primary key words, 'snowman ornaments'. So, I chose www.snowmanornaments.org as my domain name.
Next, is to include the same keywords in the title tag in the html code of my site. The text in the title tag is what appear on the web browser title bar and is a prime place that Google's spiders look to determine the content and context of a website. I also made sure the meta tags also include my keywords and other key phrases. There are two that I am interested in, the description meta tag and the keywords meta tags.
Two other SEO techniques are to include my keywords in the H1 header tags of my site and to include alternate text in the ALT= tag for all my images. The H1 header tags should give the user and the spiders and good idea as to what that particular page of my website is about. The original purpose of the ALT= was to be able to display text describing the image should there be problems displaying the image in a user's browser. However, Google search robots will take a look at the tags as well as the H1 header tags, meta tags and title to help determine the content and context of a website.
Finally, the content of the site itself weighs heavily on how my site is indexed. It is important to include the actual keywords in the content of the website. Not only is it important to have fresh, original content but it is also important that your keywords occur with enough frequency to reassure the search engines the site is about what you say it is about. This is called keyword density and the old standard is that your keywords should comprise 7-12% of the site text. However, many think that keyword density is now passe but still it is important to mention your keywords frequently in the text.
Finally, I put an XML sitemap in the topmost directory of my website. XML sitemaps are used by the search engines in order to index through the site. The sitemap is a list of all pages on my site also includes information such as the date the page was last modified, as well as a priority number of what I feel are the most important pages of my site. All these things help the search engines find and link to all content of my site.
There are a number of additional things that I will do to optimize my website more over time. Be aware that applying these SEO techinques to your website will not result in an immediate increase in your search ranking. Search engines have limited time and resources to devote to indexing websites. These spiders are programmed to determine if a site has content that changes frequently and will learn over time to visit it more frequently to re-index it. The spiders don't have this history on new sites so it will take some time for them to learn your website and visit it accordingly.
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