MosaicGlobe - Your free artist portfolio website, blog and art directory

MosaicGlobe and The Search Engines

We all know the importance of having our site rank high with specific words and phrases in the major search engines. But how search engines find and index your site can be a mystery. Site optimization starts with good HTML; and the structure of your MosaicGlobe website has been optimized for just that. However, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a mix of site coding and proper content. The content part is yours and there is a lot you can do to help get your site placed well.

How do Search engines find your site? A search engine will come across your site either from a link to it or by you submitting your site directly (submit your site to Google). The search engine will then dispatch it's spiders (or Bot) to crawl through the content of your site. This spider actually reads all of your content and makes a distinction between regular text and text given more importance such as site titles, page titles and bolded copy.

This information is sent back to the central database where it is indexed (This process can take several days and sometimes weeks). Search Engine spiders will repeat this process at regular intervals. Once your content is stored in a search engines database, the search engine runs a series of algorithms against the content. This mathematical formula is a closely guarded secret and is different for each search engine. But what it is doing is looking for those words on your MosaicGlobe site that are given more importance. In general, the key is word density, or how often a word or phrase is used in relation to the total amount of text.

In addition to the content, the search engines look at what other sites are linking to yours. This would seem to be a popularity contest of sorts. The more pages that link to your site the more important your site must be. Included in the linking category is how many links are coming from within your own site. For example, A search engine will find that your main page is more important if there is more than one link pointing to it from within your own site.

In the past, search engines used hidden tags called Meta Tags to help index your site. However, this method was abused by webmasters desperate for ranking and has for the most part been abandoned. The same goes for the 'Alt' attribute. The 'Alt' attribute is used within Image tags to give an 'Alternative' description to site images. Search engines give very little value to these tags. However, they are very important is you are concerned with accessibility and they do carry some weight so fill out your meta tags in the site settings section and give you images descriptive titles for the alt tags.

Avoid creating pages that are all graphics and no text. Spider don't have eyes and are most likely unable to critique your work. Give your images descriptive names like flower-basket.jpg rather than DSC_0059.jpg. Also add some text to your gallery pages by clicking the 'Edit Page Content' button on the edit page. You can then add some descriptive text about the images being shown on the page.

Spiders in general, also dislike hidden content, content wrapped in javascript, Lots of tables, mouse-overs, flash files, PDF content and Audio files. So if you have these, be sure to add some descriptive text around them. If you don't know what some of these are, don't worry about it.

Spiders love good page structure. A search engine friendly site is built with a solid HTML foundation. Much like us, spiders like to find the most important information at the top of a page, and the page headers should relate to the content they are reading.

The content in the following areas will have a big impact on how your site is indexed.



Site Title
HTML Tags <Title></Title>
This is what is shown at the top of the browser. It can be edited on the Settings Page of the admin area (Manage Site | Settings )

Headers
HTML Tags <H1></H1>, <H2></H2>, <H3></H3>
Header Tags are your page headers. If your page is about Zombies than the page header should read "Zombies".  Search engine absolutely love header tags.
MosaicGlobe uses header tags as follows:
H1 is your site title
H2 is your subtitle
H3 is page titles
Your Title (H1) and SubTitle (H2) can be edited on the Settings Page of the admin area (Manage Site | Settings ). Your Title (H1) is also your Site Title.
H3 Page Titles are on the individual page(s).

Bold and Strong
HTML Tags <Bold> </Bold>  or <Strong> </Strong>
Mark important words within your content with Bold or Strong Tags. Doing this with MosaicGlobe is as easy as highlighting the word within the text editor and clicking on the bold button.

Links
HTML Tag <A href="mysite.mosaicglobe.com">MySite</a>
If you have other websites, then link them to your MosaicGlobe web site. Have your friends link to your site. Comment on appropriate blog postings and include your site link. Get involved in forums and invite others to check out your site. Also, link back to important pages from within your own site.

Your MosaicGlobe website was built with SEO in mind. But the content and popularity parts of the equation are up to you. Create descriptive text content (a blog is one great way to build spider rich content - as are articles!). Give some thought to your content. Identify the words that you would like people to find your site with and use them. If they are words that people will actually type into a search engine then those are the words to use (Your name may a good place to begin). Then start getting your site linked. That may seem difficult at first, but it's also a good way to meet other people with your interests!

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