Obstacles to Natural Search

Phoenix Synergy has worked with many web sites, sites of all types and sizes. Web sites are very different from one another. Large corporations work through obstacles related to Content Management Systems (Otherwise known as CMS) and can inherently bring on trouble for Search Engines. Some times the site itself is made with a focus on fancy and flashy, and without consideration to the Search Engines the site can become invisible to them and slowly lose all traffic. We Know the downfalls and the work-around's.

Search Engines See Your Entire Site

These are some of the obstacles we've identified, don't let an obstacle to good search engine results get in the way for you.

Important Factors To Consider About Search Engine Spiders

1. They are not JavaScript Capable when they see your site.
   
2. They don't see text inside images.
3. They can only follow basic links (not fancy menu driven links).
4. They don't like long variables at the end of your web site like (& and ?)
5. They do not like frames.

Identifying Internet Marketing Obstacles

Obstacles are not the same for each customer, sometimes their site is perfectly optimized (for keyword density, no frames or long variables and the link structure is perfect). Sometimes it's a matter of analyzing the competition to find out what the real obstacle is for your site. IF they have a higher page rank, or a title that better describes what people search for in the search engines. No site is perfectly optimized for every surfers search perspective. However we can, and do, research to find the ways people are searching to find products and services such as yours.

Relevancy elements that you can control
You can control the text on your web pages, which is a major factor in determining relevance. There are three main areas of a web page that need to be considered for appropriate text: the title tag, meta tags, and the actual page content.

Title tags - The title tag is the copy that defines the title of the browser window that displays the page. Whenever you look at a web page, the very top bar of the browser (the bar where you would click to open or close the window) displays the page's title. The title tag is often overlooked because it doesn't display on the page itself, but rather in the top bar. For this reason, some sites forget to put any content in their title tags. But as you can imagine, the title of a page is weighted fairly heavily in terms of relevance. Placing appropriate keywords or phrases in your title tags can help improve search engine placement.

Meta tags - Meta tags are special tags that allow you to add keywords and descriptions to a page that do not get displayed directly to a visitor. Again, because they are not visible, they are often overlooked when producing a web site. You can check to see if you have meta tags by viewing the source on your web page. They tags will look something like this…

<META name=“description” content=“Newfangled is a company...”>

<META name=“keywords” content=“Phoenix Synergy, web design, developers, web site, newfangled,>

Because these tags do not display on a site, it is easy for some sites to “spam” their meta tags. In other words they might put their keywords in the meta tags one hundred times in an attempt to increase their relevance. Or they might use popular words that do not have anything to do with their site. Because of this some search engines ignore meta tags altogether. However, for the search engines that do consider meta tags, they can provide another opportunity to increase the relevance of your site in the search results. A good rule of thumb for meta tags is to be conservative and strategic in terms of the number if keywords you add. There is no physical limit, but the more words you add, the less each one is weighted. The more you add, the more they “water down” the effectiveness of all of the keywords. The description meta tag should be about 25 words long and simply state a general description of the page.

Web site copy - The most important keywords on your site are the words on the page itself, your site's content. While we wouldn't recommend writing the copy on your site for the purposes of getting a better position in a search engine, you might consider using a few less pronouns in cases where their use is not necessary. For example, we might write, “Newfangled Web Factory uses RaPiD prototyping and Phoenix Synergy,” instead of, “we use RaPiD prototyping and Phoenix Synergy,” as long as it doesn't make the copy too redundant or awkward. While good writing and appropriate grammar should always determine the style of your copy, keeping in mind how search engines work can help improve your positioning.

Placing the appropriate information in each of the areas of your web pages will help you achieve better relevancy in search engine results. Unfortunately even with all of the appropriate keywords in the right places, there are still other factors that determine your relevancy. Many of these factors are out of your control. For example, some search engines will look at how many other sites link to yours as a factor in determining relevancy. The more sites that link to you, the more “popular” your site is considered to be, and therefore its relevancy is increased. While requesting links on other sites is always a good idea, you cannot control whether or not another site will link to you.