# 13 - Design Your Site With Search Engines In Mind

Design Your Site With Search Engines In Mind

By Chris Maher

As artists and craftspeople, we tend to think about design in terms of visual balance, with goals such as impact or beauty in mind. On the Internet another element of design is critically important, the underlying structure of your site itself.

The structure of your web site and the design of each web page can have a strong effect on the way that your pages are ranked in a search engine. The ranking, or relevance of your page to a query, will determine where it is listed in the hundreds, perhaps thousands of matches that a search engine returns in response to a query. This in turn, can be the difference between hundreds of customers finding you, or not.

First, be sure to use META tags in the header of each page. META information is used by many search engines, and can effect the way your site is listed. AltaVista, for example, will use the first 30 words it finds on your page for a description unless you have Meta tags. If you provide a META description, it will quote it exactly. If you are not comfortable with adding your own Meta tags, try the META builder page at http://vancouver-webpages.com/VWbot/mk-metas.html. This unique site will take your input and create your META tags for you. The most important META tags are the META Description and the META Keyword. For a very good overview of META tags, and great links, check out http://searchenginewatch.com/meta.htm.

Some search engines ignore META tags, but look to the position of terms to determine relevance. You should repeat key words in the Title tag, in the Heading Tag, and repeat them as many times as you can in the text closest to the top of the page, while still keeping the sentences grammatically correct.

Another way to get more visibility from a search engine is to use several smaller pages instead of one long page. Each page will be listed, and if each has different META tags, page titles, heading tags, and content, you will be giving your site more chances of coming up in response to a query. Key words will help your relevancy ranking more on a shorter page, as they will represent a greater percentage of the total.

Most art sites use small images, or "thumbnails" as previews. Clicking on the small image leads the viewer to a larger image displayed by itself, or displayed on another page. Linking to a larger image on a web page of it's own has several advantages. First, search engines will catalog a page, but most will ignore a link to an image by itself. Most importantly, you will be able to include a title, a description of the image, and perhaps a link to a page where your customer can purchase your work. These are things that the search engines can and will include in their databases.

Keep the page around the image simple. Include only include a short description, the image title (which also should be descriptive) and perhaps a link to a page where your purchase information is. Try to word the image description in a way that will be similar to the queries that your potential customer will enter into a search engine. Think how a client might describe your work, and use those words in your caption, Meta keywords, and especially your page title. If you have only a few sentences on a page, and those words match closely the queries that are submitted to a search engine, then you've greatly improved the chances that the page with your image will be returned at the top of the list of hits.

A printmaker related the story to me about how a search engine had lead a women to one of his pieces on his web site. The print they bought was a night snow scene titled, "Snow Moon". The woman had just put that phrase in a search engine for her sister, who was to be married in a ceremony of "The First Snow Moon". When she found that image, she felt that the artist had created was the perfect wedding gift - that it was meant to be.

Are you curious about what people actually do search for? Several of the big search engines have "voyeur" pages that allow you to watch the searches that people do in real time. WebCrawler Search Voyeur has a neat scrolling Java enabled window that lets you see the search terms people are entering. Magellan Voyeur displays 12 randomly selected searches that are refreshed ever 15 seconds. And MetaCrawler's Metaspy gives you the choice of seeing a unfiltered look at the search queries of MetaCrawler users. A few minutes watching these searches can be pretty revealing.

Remember, each search engine is different. These design ideas are only some of the ways you can get you art work noticed. For more specific information on the search engines be sure to check out my Guide to Promoting Your Web Site at http://www.1x.com/promote/ I've taken all the "secrets" that I've be able to find so far and put them in tips to help you get your pages noticed by people who are likely to become buyers of your work.

I've spent many hours studying the way top engines rank pages, and continually search for new ways to gain the attention that is so critical to the success of a site. If you have any ideas to share about site design, or promotion in general, please share them with me.

This page last updated: 09/02/04

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