How do Search Engines Index a Site?

Every search engine works a little differently, and most of them do their best to try and keep how they work a secret.

However there are many things you can and should do to give your site the best chance of being indexed correctly.

Title Tag

The title statement is one of the most important pieces in your html. The title tag goes in the "HEAD" portion of your html. This is what gives your page the title that is displayed in the browser.

META Tags

META tags are HTML code that is used by browsers and search engines, even though it doesn't show on the page in a browser. These tags go in the "HEAD" portion of your site.

The most important tags in terms of search engines are the keywords, description and robots tags. Use our META tag generator to generate your own tags to insert into your html.

Keywords

Keywords are what people search for when they use a search engine. Your job is to identify what keywords you think people will use when searching for the product or service your site offers. Once you identify these keywords you then need to optimize your site for them. There are several things you'll want to do. The first is to limit a page to 1 or 2 keywords. You will never get a page that indexes well for 10 keywords. The next thing that you'll need to do is add these keywords to the page. Ideally they will be included in the TITLE and at least 3 visible places in the page. Additionally it helps to have them in the "ALT" tag of some images and also in at least on "HEADER" line. Try our keyword generator.

HTML Validation

Most search engines will not index your site if there are errors in the HTML. It is very important that you validate the html of all your pages and fix any and all errors in the html.

Validate your site's html now.

Site Speed

Site speed is very important as search engines will not wait for your page to load. You'll want to make sure that your pages all load in under 5 seconds. You can learn how to optimize your site here.

Site Links

Many of the search engines today take into account how many and what type of sites link to your site. The more sites that link to your site and the more important those sites are, the higher your site will be ranked. This means you will have to ask other sites to link to your site.