Search Engine Marketing 101: What Search Engines See When They Visit Your Web Site

If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add the site to its index Do you know that it doesnt see the beautiful graphics or the fancy Web design Do you know that it only sees the source code, or the "skeleton" of your Web site

Do you realize that knowing this little tidbit of information and doing something about it can make a huge difference in your search engine rankings and, ultimately, the success of your online business

One very important thing that you need to remember is: the search engines like simplicity. The simpler your Web site is, the easier it is for the engine to determine what your Web site is about. And, if the search engine can determine exactly what your Web site is about, you have a better chance at top rankings under the keyword phrases that are important for your online business.

Lets look at this concept in action with a page I recently created for one of my online businesses: Search Engine Workshops.

http://www.searchengineworkshops.com/articles/search-engine-seminars.html

As you can see, its a very plain, simple page that was not created to be the "main" or "home" page of a Web site. Rather, it was created to pull in traffic through the keyword phrase, "search engine seminars."

What I really want you to see is the source code of the page. So, when viewing the page, click on View on the top menu bar, then Source or Source Code.

The most important part of a Web page is what appears at the very top of the page. Why Because a search engine starts at the top of the page and begins moving down as it indexes.

So, what appears in the section of your Web page is very important, because the section is at the top of the page.

Lets look at the section of the source code:

Search Engine Seminars--your path to success on the Web!

There are only three tags in the section of this Web page: the title tag, the keyword META tag, and the description META tag. Because the title tag is in the section, and because of the importance that most engines place on the tag, it is considered one of the most important tags on your page, so it should always be the first tag in the section.

Notice that in the title and keyword META tag, the important keyword phrase search engine seminars appears as the first words in the tag. In the description META tag, the keyword phrase is still toward the beginning of the tag, as opposed to the end.

In other words, where you place your keyword phrase in the tags and content of your page is important. If you place your keyword phrase toward the beginning of all of your important tags and toward the beginning of the contents, youre "proving" to the engines that the page is really about that particular topic.

Ive mentioned one reason why the title tag is important, but theres another reason too. The title tag is important because it almost always appears as the title of the site in the search engine results. Your description META tag may appear in th