Findable Sites: Creating Websites For People and Search Engines
For Crying Out Loud: Don't Ignore the Title Tags!
Are you creating a site for a few people to use and that you do not want to show up in search engines like Google?
Ignore this site and continue on.
However, if you are providing information for the Web that you want people to find and use, start here! Increasingly, people are using tools like ColdFusion to create Web sites. Now, ColdFusion has many useful features. Unfortunately, creating findable sites is not one of them. Search engines need to find Web sites before people can find Web sites. In some cases, dynamically-created Web pages can render Websites invisible to search engines.
In order for a search engine like Google to find your site, you need to include some static files on your server. These files can be text files, HTML files, or XML files. If your site is only built using ColdFusion, without any files of these types, potential users will never find your site because search engine spiders are unable to spider it. So if you're not getting much traffic at your site and you're using a product like ColdFusion to build your site, that could be why.
Web sites should be both findable and searchable. A findable Web site is anything that can be located by a search engine. Findable sites have Web pages that:
- Contain text
- Use descriptive titles
- Use meta tags properly
- Use heading tags to help organize information
- Use alt tags to label graphics
Content is the currency of search engines. Without real content (text), you won't have good search engine placement.
If you use a tool like ColdFusion to manage your Web site, you need to have at least one text page of general information about the site to help make the site be more findable.
Further, tools like ColdFusion can make your site virtually invisible to blind people or people who use really old browsers. A good way to test your Web site is to use lynx, an older text-based browser (lynx is a Unix command). Lynx presents Web sites pretty much the same way the text-to-voice browsers for the blind do. So if you want to understand how a blind person "hears" a Web site, view your Web site with lynx.
Many Web sites built from databases do produce text-based pages. The Internet Movie Database has static files that Web search engines can catalog. If you go to Google and search on "Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings," you'll see one of the first sites returned is the IMDB entry on Return of the King. Whenever you see a question mark (?) in a URL, that page has been generated by database. In the case of IMDB, this site makes its database searchable by search engines.
In addition to being findable by search engines, Web sites should have their own search engines. Atomz and Google both offer free site search engines. These site-specific searches are invaluable for the users trying to find information at your site.
And no matter how you generate your pages, always create a sitemap that's linked to every page. Always put the sitemap in HTML - even if the rest of your site is in ColdFusion. A text-based sitemap is invaluable, for search engine spiders and for breathing users. Site maps are particularly invaluable to blind users as it helps them to reach other parts of your site more readily.
This Web site will contain help and show examples of invisible Web sites to help you understand why this is a problem. For now, take a look at a page I first wrote for the Web in 1996: Optimizing Your Web Page's Location in Search Engine Results.
Write to for a free consultation. I can provide fast, reliable turn-around on your SEO project or content development/maintenance project. Depending on the content of your site, I can usually improve your site's ranking in Google and other major search engines.