About every other month I’m asked by a client, colleague or friend to explain to them how to ensure their website is properly indexed by search engines. Usually there is a combination of fear and angst in their voice because they suspect this is very important and expect it’s going to be expensive.

I find it easiest to just get them on the phone and go thru my strategies which I’ve found to be very effective for the average website. Recently one recipient put our conversation in note form and I in the name of distributed information I though to reprint here.

These practices are all based upon general industry consensus and actual deployment experiences. The best part is the entire list is easy to integrate, ethical and entirely free. I have to point out though that these steps are only for sites that are not in a highly competitive keyword space. For example is your top keyword would be jewelry or vacations or electronics you are going up against some very stiff competition who employ every trick in the book. If this is you, find an expert and consider changing your entire site’s focus to breaking into the top ten.

If you are just a regular site in a regular space (e.g. small business, non-profit, information resource, entertainment site, personal site, etc) it’s very likely if you follow these basics you’ll get in the top ten or top twenty for you specific field as long as you are realistic about what your specific field is.

To begin with you need to determine what your specific field is. In a keyword senese think of it as your core description. For the purpose of this article we’ll imagine someone who is making is making “custom dog jewelry,” but it could as easily be “new york city runaway center,” or “bay area theatre rentals,” “independent cinema promotions.” You should strive to get into the top ten results when you search on your core description. Not the title of this entry is actually 3 ways of saying the same thing in my hopes that people needing this information will find it via a search engine.

To you’ll want to have your key descriptive phrase and meaningful phrase variants in the following places:

• The website domain name (this is triple points if, for example, your url is customdogjewelry.com)
• Any subdirectories or filename in the URL (e.g. mysite.com/customdogjewelry/ or mysite.com/customdogjewelry.html) is also helpful. Avoid using vague terms or numeric ID’s to identify your pages (e.g. mysite.com/dir1 or mysite.com/index.html?page=2). Note how WordPress named this very entry URL by making using parts of the title words.(Clever them ;)
• The HTML title of the webpage. (very important. try and use 2 to 3 rephrases of your service)
• Meta Tags (keyword and description) should still be filled in, but are almost universally ignored, so waste no time here.
• Placing important words in HTML <H1> tags is said to be given preference. With CSS you can make a <H1> actually appear however you want to it’s always a good idea to use them.
• On your homepage you should have viewable copy (as HTML text not images) that states 4 or 5 times in varying language what service you offer. Hit your key phrase 2 to 3 times without making it obvious to readers you are repeating it.

It’s really important for the IMPORTANT PHRASES to be found MORE THAN ONCE in the exact phraseology in multiple places in the site. Have that text in the main intro statement, then make it in the page elsewhere. You need to put the words NEXT TO EACH OTHER such as SPACE VENUE RENTAL SAN FRANCISCO CONVENTION/etc. put them at the bottom of the page near the legalese stuff, PUT THOSE WORDS DOWN THERE AGAIN IN SMALL TYPEFACE. The search engines will read this, this is helpful. The reader will ignore, but the machine that crawls the web will not. Put this in the footer on every page of the SITE! It’s also important to consider what terms you prospective visitors would use to find your site. Someone wanting custom dog jewelry may seek “glittery dog items,” “wholesale canine finery,” or “doggie bling-bling” and you’ll need to make sure those phrases are in your site. Make sure you have verbiage that anyone seeking your site would use.

The homepage will get indexed much more frequently than any others. If there is a secondary page that covers the content your refer to in your keywords, make sure those page has the key phrases. But put all your focus on your important pages (i.e. each page that covers a distinct topic you think people will be seeking) and not your secondary pages the less your ranking will be diluted in terms

It can take anywhere between 1 hour and 6 weeks for search engines to find and index you. Many engines find you by following a link on another page linking to you, but if in doubt each engine will have a submit feature (somewhere) and you can simply use that.

Outside of your site content it’s VERY important that other websites, preferably other quality websites are linking to yours. Many engines decides a site’s worth by determining how many other sites on the internet link to it. Ask around and see which friends, partners, colleagues could give you a link. Keep doing good work and people will link to you on their own volition

You can see in your web stats which search engine spiders have come to your site. Also once you see your site in search engine results, start testing how you rank based upon different keywords combos. At this point you can tweak your website to see how it affects your rankings. Take care to do this process slowly to make sure that your changes have been indexed before judging their results.

That’s it. These steps should get you above anyone less qualified and even some qualified ones. If your space isn’t too competitive this should get you found. There are further ethical steps that could be taken but that’s beyond the scope of this and really are only going to help if you’re in a highly competitive space. Finally don’t be tempted to try and game the system. Most every trick that you can think of has been isolated by the search engineer coders and either you’ll be penalized in your rankings or removed from their results altogether, so take care.

A couple sites that offer a lot of free info (amongst their ads and subscription features) are High Ranking Advisor and Search Engine Guide.

Ex Post Posto: This is an excellent up-to-date search ranking factors site