by Robin Nobles

If you have a Web site, have you ever wondered what a search engine sees when it visits your site to add site to its index? Do you know that it doesn't see beautiful graphics or fancy Web design? Do you know that it only sees source code, or "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, success of your online business?

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

Let's 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, it's a very plain, simple page that was not created to be "main" or "home" page of a Web site. Rather, it was created to pull in traffic through keyword phrase, "search engine seminars."

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

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

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

Let's look at section of source code:

top of rankings?">

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

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

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

I've mentioned one reason why title tag is important, but there's another reason too. The title tag is important because it almost always appears as title of site in search engine results. Your description META tag may appear in search engine results as well and is considered important by some of engines. So, when you create your title and description tags, remember two things: put your keyword phrase toward beginning of tags, and make tags captivating and designed to pull in traffic.

The first thing to consider is that search engines do not see pictures or other graphics. If you have rendered some very important text (loaded with keywords) as an image, a beautiful multi-colored gif for example, search engine will not index these keywords. There are some wizard-oriented web creation tools that may automatically change your text into a gif or jpg image. It may look like text to you, but not to a search engine. Thus, you have to weigh relative importance of good images against need to give search engine something to chew on, some "spider food". Usually a balance has to be struck. At one extreme are pages that contain only images. For example if you have an entry page with a beautiful image of ocean and a beautiful sunset with one word saying Enter. It may be dramatic looking, but it is not very interesting for a search engine. Similarly sites that are only Flash images, don't give anything for search engine's "spider" (robotic gathering tool) to gobble up and put into index. If you want to use Flash, consider making a hybrid page, one that has some elements, such as informative text, of normal HTML and a section in Flash. Keep this in mind and make sure that your important concepts and keywords do appear on your pages in a text format.

However as pictures and graphics are very important, there is something that can be done to optimize them for search engine recognition. You can put an alt tag or alternative text on each image. The search engines will read this text and index words you have entered. Thus if you have your company's logo at top of page Acme Widgets, you can write and alternative text: "Acme Widgets, California's first producer of Electronic Widgets". Put your mouse over A1-Optimization logo at top of this page and you can see alt text which I used for this image. Search engines will see this tag and tag will also appear when your web visitors put their mouse on image. Whenever you have an image, take opportunity to put an alternative text tag. But remember that, although alternative text tag is indeed indexed by search engines, it is not given as much importance as other text elements.