Helping Search Engines Find Your Site

[CHR]

In a recent guest blog post, Vanessa Fox of Google's Sitemaps gives simple, effective advice on helping search engines find your pages. A few quotes:

Search engines want to return relevant and useful results for searchers. All you really need to do is look at your site through the eyes of your audience. What do they see when they get to your site? Can they easily find what they’re looking for? Webmasters are looking for some other secret key, but really, that’s all there is to it.

About Flash:

It’s not only Googlebot who doesn’t watch a 20 second video load before the home page comes into view. A lot of users don’t either. Some users don’t want to wait that long; other users don’t have Flash installed. If all of your content and menus are in Flash, search engines may have a harder time following the links.

About Images:

What is true for Flash is also true of images. Many users have images turned off. Try viewing your site with images turned off in your browser. Can you still see all the content and links?

About general site info:

You know what your site’s about, so it may seem completely obvious to you when you look at your home page. But ask someone else to take a look and don’t tell them anything about the site. What do they think your site is about?

Vanessa gives a good example showing what happens when a page displays vague and/or incomplete text about its target topic.

I see this happening a lot on flower shop sites, especially WS templates.

A few places to check:

• Do your shop name, address, local phone number and delivering cities appear in text on your home page and interior pages? If not, request your webmaster add the info right away. (Many TF templates still only display shop names in the upper left corner image.)
• Does Your 'About Us' page really reflect the unique information about your shop? Your staff? You don't need pages of details, but adding words that reflect your company and its history can help give more relevant 'on page' information to search engines. Default WS template text will likely be ignored by search engines since it is duplicate content.
• Do your product images and other graphics have alternate text? In IE, mouse over the images and see if any text appears. The text should be brief, relevant descriptions of the images. If not, request text be added right away.

These tips are just for starters.... There's much more that can be done - but without the basics in place, subsequent efforts will be less productive.

 

[clay]

A few places to check:

• Does Your 'About Us' page really reflect the unique information about your shop? Your staff? You don't need pages of details, but adding words that reflect your company and its history can help give more relevant 'on page' information to search engines. Default WS template text will likely be ignored by search engines since it is duplicate content.

• 
  
  I look at a lot of florists websites when I would like to know something about them (just like a customer) ...and I would say that 60% of all florist's websites with a Teleflora/FTD template do not do this.....or even have a picture of their shop in the blank image spot. A good example of this was a website that I checked out when I was calling some flowers to my mom in Midland, TX....Flowerland. They are the biggest and best (in my opinion) shop in Midland owned by Mark Knox (former FTD President) ....http://www.florists.ftd.com/flowerland/aboutus.html?website_id=525745555457516565.....is typical of most florists. They are lucky they are even listed on the first page of Google under Florist Midland TX search....but only their Privacy & Security page and their FTD Gourment Basket page, not their Home page.

 

[clay]

A typical florist's "About"

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About XXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXX has been proudly serving XXXXXX since 19XX. We are family owned and operated with locations serving the XXXXX area. We are committed to offering only the finest floral arrangements and gifts, backed by service that is friendly and prompt. Because all of our customers are important, our professional staff is dedicated to making your experience a pleasant one. That is why we always go the extra mile to make your floral gift perfect.

Let XXXXXXXXX be your first choice for flowers.




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The attached image is the same image one used on flowershops in about every state. Not trying to be mean to one of our 900+ flowerchat member florist that I took this from...but only to get everone to look at their "About Us" page for items mentioned above in Cathy's post.