Leadership Viewpoint

If you’ve been following along with these postings and building your site, you should now have a nice little website posted on the Internet. Now what will it take to get it listed and for people to find it? Luckily, the folks at Webstudio have a very simple method built into their program to make this easy. Simply double-click on the background of a web page, and a dialog box entitled ‘Object Properties’ will open. Click on the ‘Page Meta Tags’ tab and enter the Page Title, Description and Keywords. These should be whatever you want the page to be found under. Once that’s done for each page, it’s smart to also do it for the website as a whole. Go to Website, Website Properties, Web Search Information and complete that too. Then load the whole thing into your Public HTML file online, and you’re good to go!

There are lots of articles online regarding the ins and outs of loading these keywords. A comprehensive reference piece by Bruce Grossan provides an excellent understanding. A lot of websites employ various tricks to increase their rankings, so much so that search engines keep altering their processes to make it difficult to manipulate. In my experience, the real key to good rankings in the long term has been good content. Put worthwhile information on your website, label it with appropriate keywords, and submit it to the search engines. If you do your job, they will do theirs.

The other matter that you should keep in mind is that search engines seem to have a bias toward sites that are updated regularly. If you continually alter and improve your website, they will be more inclined to rank you higher, assuming more current content is more relevant to the searcher. Blogs work well toward this end, since the search engines are ‘pinged’ when new content is added. Whenever you do any major site updates, resubmit your information to the search engines. It doesn’t hurt anything, and it may just help.

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