We provide various facilities in edeptive? to make life easy for search engine robots, so they can easily access your whole site and so the important bits of text appear in the right format. To start with there is a special site map for robots (yourdomain.com/edeptive_site_map.htm) which uses links with / instead of ? and & so that older robots (which don't like ?id=123&x=5 query strings) will still find things. We also put the name of each section into the title bar of the web browser (Google likes that) as well as using H1 tags around each document item title (Google likes that too).

Ensuring you get a good position is tricky. It depends on lots of factors, including some you have little control over (how long your site has been on the search engine, how many other sites link to yours). However, the most important aspect is "keyword density" which is simply: how often does a keyword appear in a block of text, relative to the size of that block of text. If you look at www.edeptive.com/what you will see how we constructed a page to maximise the keyword density for our site - using keywords, "content management", "content management system", "content management software", etc. Another item which some search engines rank highly is having the keywords in the file name of the web page, so we often name templates this way.

Probably the most useful other thing you can do is to find other relevant sites which might link to yours. Not only can this give you more referrals directly from those sites but it should also improve your position in search engines.

You can get other sites to link to yours by, for example, creating press announcements and e-mailing them to sites which talk about your speciality (we did this with a couple of "press releases" and got links to our site from each of them). These tend only to last a few months so you might have to think of new press releases from time to time. And there's no guarantee they will get published. [Sites which publish reviews, press releases, etc on the web are often e-zines (electronic magazines).]

Another approach which may help improve your site's rankings is to find relevant sites with a bulletin board and post an item saying, "hey, look at our cool new e-commerce site" (ok, preferably something more meaningful) with a link to your site. But be careful - lots of people object to this as a form of spam.

Last, but not least, search engines like up-to-date content, so add and change things as often as you can.

It's worth pointing out here that search engines and their robots have changed a lot over the last few years - mainly due to Google. This means that some of the received wisdom concerning them is out of date - last summer one of our customers brought in a search engine optimisation company and, whilst some of their suggestions were useful, several of their suggestions were demonstrably out of date.

Many search engines regard meta tags (e.g. Keywords) as a last resort - they use that info only if there isn't any text on the page. This is because meta tags have been misused for ages (i.e. put a competitor's name in the keywords but not visible on the page) so they have no real value - it's the text on the page which is important. However, if the meta tag keywords also occur in an invisible paragraph at the bottom of the page that can make a difference (the search engines don't yet appear to notice that the paragraph is invisible).

Submitting your site to lots of search engines is unlikely to make much (if any) difference. It's estimated that 80% of all searches are done on Google. If Yahoo and MSN take up some of the rest, then you can see that most other search engines have very little usage, so will give you very few (if any) visitors. We recommend submitting a site to Google, Yahoo, MSN and AskJeeves. However, if you know of some search engines aimed at your speciality then those would be worth submitting to (e.g. we appear on www.cmsmatrix.org). Once you appear on any of these search engines, you will start to appear on other search engines too as they all index each other.

We use Google's AdWords and it has been quite successful for us. How much you pay per month depends on how expensive your keywords are, how many clicks you expect per day, etc. The main advantage of AdWords is that you can appear on page 1 of the search results right now, whilst it can take weeks (even months) to appear on page one in the search results themselves. When we started on AdWords we were getting our maximum clicks per day but as we worked out how to make our site look good to Google and we began to move up the search results we started getting clicks from the search results and fewer clicks from AdWords. We now get about 137 referrals from Google (.co.uk and .com and international) per week but only about 13 per week from AdWords - which is as we want it: our AdWords ad appears on page one for various searches, including some for which our site doesn't appear on page one in the search results, but we only have to pay for 13 clicks per week. Oh, and if you're thinking that 137 referrals per week isn't much, remember there aren't quite as many people searching for Content Management as there are for, say, Mobile Phone.

As an example, for one of our keyword phrases, "content management system", we are number 9 out of 804,000,000 in the world on Google. On Yahoo (which we haven't targeted) we're 7 out of 4,510,000 in the UK, and on MSN (since its re-launch) 23 out of 23,003,187 in the UK. Clearly our web sites are designed in a way which search engines do not object to.

By default we block various robots which don't seem to have any benefit to the person running a site. However, your robots.txt is specific to your site and can be modified as you like. We also do some blocking of specific robots and IPs in our code for those robots which ignore robots.txt and which we have caught and think are a nuisance. We have a "site statistics" report which can list all the robots visiting your site in any date range, so you can see what's going on. In addition, we monitor robot visits to our servers so we can keep abreast of any changes in behaviour, new robots, etc.