When people are looking for information on the Internet, how do they find yours? Usually people use a search engine such as www.altavista.com, www.google.com, or www.yahoo.com, to type in the information they're looking for.  Depending on how well you've prepared your web pages can make a significant difference in the ranking of your page (how high up the list your page appears when people search on a certain term). 

Here are some tips that will help your site rank higher in the search engines.

Search engines rank the pages on every website according to the relevance your pages have to certain topics. This ranking is determined by many things, including an index of all of the words on your page. But there are other ways to help your pages rank higher in the search engine listings. For the best possible ranking, try these four steps.

1) Use Descriptive Titles

Search engines give extra weight to words that are contained in the title of a page. So if your page deals with homosexuality, use a title that includes other words related to your page. For instance, instead of just using a short title such as Homosexuality, be more descriptive using words like What the Bible says about Sex and Homosexuality, or What God says in the Bible about Sex and Homosexuality.

This could draw people looking not just for information on homosexuality, but also for information about the Bible or God or Sex in general.

To change a title after you’ve already saved your page, just open the page in FrontPage, and go to File | Properties, type your new title and click OK.

If you’ve ever searched using a search engine, you’ll remember seeing a paragraph come up underneath each page to describe that page. (Try it by going to www.altavista.com in your browser and search for the word reformation.  You'll see a paragraph under each heading.)  By default, the description paragraph includes the first couple of sentences the search engine finds on the page, whether meaningful or not. But you can define what users see in this paragraph using a description meta tag.

This description will not be visible to visitors to the page itself, but will appear in search engines that describe the page. You can make these descriptions compelling so people will want to click on them. The words in this description are also given extra weight in ranking of the page, so choose words that are likely to be searched for.

For the home page for our church site, the description people would see is this:

To enter a description on your page, click File | Properties | Custom. Under User Variables, click Add. In the Name field, type description. In the Value field, type More than a church website, this site has answers to the questions on your heart. Click OK, then OK again and it’s added to that page. Click File | Save. You can do this for every page on your website, giving each a unique description about that page. You can see where it adds it to the heading of your page by clicking the HTML tab at the bottom.

You can include about 25 words in your description (or 150 characters including spaces and punctuation). More than that and they’ll get cut off when displaying to users who are reading them on search engines.

Search engines give more weight to words that appear on the page. The more often a word appears, the more likely that page is about that subject. But to make sure the words you think are important are conveyed to the search engine, regardless of how many times they appear in the document, you can type in a list of the keywords.

Here are the keywords I used on the home page for our church website:

You can include words more than once, but not more than 4 or 5 times or the search engine will consider that "unfair" or "spamming" and discard all of your pages on your site.

Use lower case primarily, as people searching in upper or lower case will find both variations. Use common phrases together if it’s more likely someone will search on that particular phrase. Repeat a few important words, even with common misspellings for those words that are likely misspelled.

Don’t try to trick the search engine, using words like free, free, free, or sex, sex, sex, unless you mention those somewhere on your website.  If you do address these issues, definitely mention them as they are very common search terms!  But if you don’t address them, a search engine made discard all of your pages.

You can type up to about 100 words in your keyword list, with the most important words near the top in case some search engines place limits on how many keywords they index.

To add keywords, click File | Properties | Custom. Under User Variables, click Add. In the Name field, type keywords. In the Value field, type all of your keywords, separated by commas. Click OK, then OK again and it’s added to that page. You can do this for every page on your website, giving each a unique set of keyword.

4) Label all of your pictures and graphics

Search engines also give extra weight to descriptions of pictures, since the search engine won’t know what the picture is about otherwise. You can raise your ranking by describing each picture. Simply right-click on a picture and choose Picture Properties. In the Alternative Representations section, enter the description in the Text field, such as Tim Hughes preaches an encouraging sermon while Kent Sanders leads the worship team with his guitar in sanctuary.

This may seem extra descriptive, but each of these words will be added to the ranking of this page…someone searching for "sermons," "guitars," "preaching," "worship," or "Tim Hughes" will more likely find your page.

These tips are not difficult, but relatively few people use them. Because of that their pages don’t show up very high in searches. Many people have come to our website searching for "Ted Turner" or "Pete Rose" or "teenage sexuality" because we’ve deliberately included pages dealing with these people and topics, and providing a Christian perspective on them.

For more tips on search engines, meta tags, and how to get your pages to appear, visit www.searchenginewatch.com. You’ll also see the top search engines and tips on how to submit your website to each one. Each search engine has their own rules, but it’s worth exploring this to give your site the widest possible audience.