ITMUSTBE Search Engines

We implement fundamental search engine strategies into each site we build. We ensure your content is correctly marked up ready for optimal indexing by search engines. We also build your site structure in such a way as to emphasize your keywords. For example, search engines place significant weight on the URL, so an article located at itmustbe.com/articles/search_engines would stand a better chance at high rankings than the same article posted at itmustbe.com/articles?id=0100010101 (cp. Wikipedia's form of link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engines). Much weight is also placed on the text which forms the link, so instead of click here we recommend using keywords (in our example, search engines) for the link text. The addition of your keywords to certain structural markup is also important (such as header and emphasis tags). These tags convey important shades of meaning to search engines, but are often overlooked (both by developers and applications which generate web pages) in favor of using CSS shortcuts to make text appear structured and emphasized, without the full XHTML markup (effectively empty of additional machine-readable meaning). As the web evolves into a universal medium for information exchange by integrating documents with computer-processable meaning (the semantic web), we can expect even greater benefits in search engine technology.

The web is massive and mobile, consisting of billions of documents in over 100 languages, many of which change or disappear on a daily basis. Currently, there is very little consistency in terms of how information is organized and presented on the web, and much content is inaccessible, hidden within antiquated code. Code in line with modern W3C standards has the advantage of being inherently optimized for search engines, in great part because it enables an important separation between site content (copy, data, meaning) and presentation (layouts, design, styles). This simplifies the search engine indexing process, directing spiders to areas of importance, without distracting them with meaningless additional markup. W3C accessibility requirements (including proper use of certain structural markup, dynamic techniques, and multimedia) also allow search engines to index images and more diverse content on your site (further boosting rankings, since search engines favor sites with more content over sites with less). It is also important that the site be written in code which is syntactically valid – having much specialized processing to do, search engine spiders are less forgiving in parsing code than mainstream web browsers, and will stop indexing the current page if they encounter errors in the code syntax.