Findable Sites: Help Customers find Your Web Pages

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 to create dynamic Web sites, but these sites are not consistently findable. Search engines need to find Web sites before people can find Web sites.

Findable Sites is a Web site creation service, focusing on content. I'll take design elements from your brochures, menus, et.c. and use those elements to create a simple, easy-to-maintain, easy to find Web site or Facebook page.

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:

Content is the currency of search engines. Without real content (text), you won't have good search engine placement.

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.

And no matter how you generate your pages, always create a sitemap that's linked to every page. Always put the sitemap in HTML. 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.