Search Engine Marketing Tips - Site Architecture

* Most comments by Shari Thurow, Webmaster and Marketing Director of GrantasticDesigns.com

According to Thurow, each Web site has two target audiences. The primary audience is the end user. The secondary audience consists of the directory editors and search engine spiders. Your goal in search engine marketing and optimization is to receive regular traffic over time from both the search engines and the directories.

Search engines do three things: index text, follow links, and measure popularity. End users have an effect on search engine ranking.

"Your target audience should not have to perform any type of action in order to view the most important text on a Web page," said Thurow. "Highlight the text on your page and copy it in Notepad, which is exactly what a search engine sees."

Thurow reminded participants that META tags aren't visible tags. ALT text is not visible, so it's not as important to the search engines, and search engine marketing, as visible text. However, be sure to include your keyword phrase in your ALT text.

You can use ALT text in logos, image maps, navigation elements, Flash movies, photos, etc. "Always put width and height on image maps so the browser knows the size of the graphic. Download time is so important," said Thurow.

She also cautioned against the use of clear gifs. "Putting keywords as ALT text in a clear gif is considered spamming by the engines," she added. Spamming will definitely have a negative impact in search engine marketing.

Thurow defined Cascading Style Sheets as an HTML addition that allows Webmasters to control Web page design parameters, such as margins, font/typeface appearance, link appearance, colors, and placement.

CSS massively decreases download time and saves a lot of time, and this is positive for searche engine marketing. But style sheets themselves don't matter to the search engines.

Be sure to use a robots exclusion file on sections of your site that the search engines have no interest, such as your style sheets, CGI-BIN, and any pages under construction to keep them from getting indexed. All search engines support this protocol. This exclusion file will help in search engine marketing by only letting the spiders see what you want.