Paphos People

First in a series of short articles about this:

It's one thing paying to have a website for your business designed and published, but if it isn't constructed properly then you could be wasting an awful lot of time and effort.

A couple of quick things to check to see if your site is on the right track:

- Are you properly listed in the search engines? Google is by far the most popular search engine, so this is the best place to check. Try a Google search for site:yourdomain.com and see how many pages are returned. It can take a few months for Google to fully explore your site, so don't worry too much if you don't get many results for a new site, but if your site has been out there for a while and Google isn't listing the majority of your pages then you may have a problem.

- That problem is most likely to be the coding of your site - when they check out your site, the search engines are looking for Meta tags built into the code of the site that should tell them what they need to know to be able to rank it properly. There are three main Meta tags of interest; the Title, Description and Keywords tags. There are a few ways you can check yours, but the easiest is probably to right click your mouse on an empty area of the page you're interested in, and select the option "View Source". This will show you a new window with the code for that page in it. You're looking towards the top of this page for something that looks like this:




If it isn't there, or if the information in there is minimal or inaccurate then you need to resolve this quickly, as a site incorrectly or inaccurately coded isn't going to work anywhere near its full potential.

A common shortcut is to put identical data in the tags for all the pages on a site, which kind of defeats the object. If this has been done on your site, it will become quickly apparent when you do the site: search above, as the results will all look the same.