Revealed to you free, how to get your web site to the top of the search engines | ||
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IntroductionSo here's the deal, to get people to come to your web site they have to know about its content and location. How do they find it? By using an Internet Search Engine, such as Alta Vista, Excite or Yahoo. You submit your site description and URL location to the search engine and, after a while, it will scan your web pages and add them to its search list. Now, when a user types in search keywords to a search engine it checks its index to find pages which contain those key words. Fairly quickly a list of all the relevant pages, ranked in order of relevance are presented. Since often this will result in 10's, 100's or even 1,000's of pages the real trick is to ensure that (a) your page appears close to the top, (b) that your page looks interesting. The simple advice below explains how to make the most of both these opportunities. In short though, most engines work on a similar basis, they take the users search words and compare them with the first words on your page. This includes your title, any META TAGS (explained below) and roughly the first 100 words. If the search words appear in this set then you will be in the search list. The closer to the top of the document and the more frequently the words occur, then the closer to the top of the list you will be ranked. And that's it. Get to the top of the list with an exciting and enticing title and you are guaranteed to increase your web traffic. Is there more than the web? Yes, Yes and YES. Don't forget that you absolutely must publicise your web site using your conventional marketing, including flyers, brochures and your letterhead. Don't forget to use your email signature and, probably the most important, swapping links with other sites, especially in related areas. Don't pay for what you can get for free If you are on the web for long you will undoubtedly start receiving spam mail offering you the best search engines secrets for a small fee. Don't bother, they won't tell you much more than you can read here for FREE.
Remember, many search engines will only show the document title, so make it as enticing as possible. Those old hot buttons such as "secret", "free" and "you" always work well. So, instead of "Search Engine Technology" you have "REVEALED, Search Engine SECRETS YOU can use for FREE on YOUR web site". Tacky, but true. So for example:
META TAGS are special HTML codes which can be embedded into your web pages. There are many tags, but we are particularly interested in two which most web search engines use to assist user searches.
META NAME="keywords" contents="word1, word2, word3" These tags must be placed in the <HEAD> section of your web page. These are often the most critical words in your search strategy, make your description as powerful as possible to entice readers in and use keywords which are most likely to be used to find your page. Now these tags are invisible to a visitor to your page, but the description in particular may be seen at a search engine site. Incidentally, there is some suggestion that keywords without commas work better, we're trying to confirm this One final note, most search engines will now eliminate a page which has a keyword listed more than a few times (about 5) to avoid deliberate attempts to fool the search engine. But TITLE is vital However, the title has greater significance in the ranking than the META tags. So, make sure your title says it all, with your really hot list of keywords. And note, because the ranking is based on the average of search words versus non-searched words, you are better off keeping your company name out of the title. Title Stuffing There are two techniques which currently work, but will probably be soon policed out, there are stuffing and stacking.
Title stuffing looks like this:
Title stacking looks like this:
First of all you need to come up with a list of keywords, now remember, put yourself in the shoes of someone looking for an answer, but who doesn't know you are, what you do or what your products called. Then brainstorm as many keywords as you can. Next, add in your special keywords, product name and company name in particular. Then, take out any keyword that is in your title (this will be included anyway). Now you need to test them, come up with what you think the best 20 are and try them at Alta Vista or Hot Bot and see what they come up with. Follow a few links, see if they are relevant, if so, what keywords are they using? What about combinations, are there sensible two word pairs that produce very short listings? Remember, you are trying to get a searcher to focus on your page, we are not trying to just generate traffic at this point. So the keywords need to be relevant and help to drill down to who you are. Once you've got your keyword list, you now need to generate a description using the keywords, believe me, this can be tricky! But try and keep those keywords together and don't let your description run over 40/50 words.... If you end up with several, don't forget you can use them within META TAGS and a different version actually at the top of the text itself. Who you trying to reach? Don't forget, you are often trying to reach a category of buyer often. So you might be trying to rent a holiday home so you start off with keywords "holidays, devon, seaside" etc. But what about other interests, "deep sea fishing, walking, countryside, beaches, sealife, yachting, surfing..." Or, how about if your buyers often use a particular product or would have a related interest? Players of Monopoly are also likely to be players of Scrabble, Risk, Othello and other games.
Whatever else this tells you, most people searching are not looking for high-brow content! Sex related keywords account for over 60% of all searches. Unfortunately it also means that if your keywords include those above, then you are up against a lot of competition. But maybe one of those words and another keyword....
The Big Eight Are: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Web Crawler, Infoseek, Excite and Lycos. You can expect this to change over time... Should you concentrate on these? Yes, absolutely, but don't forget the specialist search sites which concentrate on your trade or area. Also there may be country specific sites which you should be registering in as well, could you be selling to Germany, France, Australia? The standard submit programs will focus on the US based engines.
Alta Vista
Unless you use META tags Alta Vista references the first 30 words of your page
for the on-screen description. Then relevance is scored by words closest to
the top of document. Alta-Vista is also sort of case sensitive, despite the fact it says it isn't, searches for all capitalised words do not pick out the uncapitalised variations, a search for "Uniplex" generates thousands of entries, "UNIPLEX" does not... Infoseek
Unless you use META tags, Infoseek will index the first 200 words of your text.
Pages are rated by: Infoseek also works on the basis of link popularity, that is the more sites point to you the higher your rating. Lycos
Indexes are based on a psuedo-intelligent abstract of the document, highest rankings
can be achieved by: Yahoo Yahoo is a directory based system, although it uses Alta Vista for searching, so a local Yahoo search will only use the 25 words you enter on your description. Yahoo is said to account for 70% of all business done the Internet (I'm not sure how they account this but anyway). What is clear is that the precise 25 word description, your category and your title are all vital parts of your Yahoo listing. Webcrawler
Confidence rating is based on number of times the keywords are repeated within
the document. Webcrawler also checks to see how many other pages in its index
link to any found page. Excite
Excite does not use META TAGS, instead it relies purely on the text of the document.
A 3 or 4 star review will boost a page. Excite also uses "concept" searching, which sort
of understands the "theme" of a web page...
Hot Bot
Getting a lot of rave reviews recently because of the accuracy of its searches.
Higher scores are achieved by:
Learning Engines A number of the search engines learn how frequently your site changes and adjust the frequency of return visits accordingly, you may want to keep tweaking your pages to ensure frequent return indexing. What they don't look for Some spiders don't scan your whole site, they will only go 1 to 3 levels deep. If your site is deeply nested you may need to post some of the sub-levels too. Some engines, such as WebCrawler will not scan pages with a very low REFRESH time in them, we expect this to appear in other engines too. The Web Police Because some individuals continually push the search engine envelope to ensure their site, (usually Asian Hot Babes or similar) appears at the top the search engine technologists are continually working to eliminate and police the junk listings. So for example, at present we know that:
Web spiders, also known as crawlers, are the special host names of the software for each search engine that actually comes to your site and reads your pages. So if your ISP provides you with access logs (as all Centreline 2000 sites get) you can soon identify which visitors are the spiders.
Top Tips
Crafty Ideas
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URL: www.c2000.com/papers/wt_inet4.htm © 1995-2001 Centreline 2000 Last Updated: 1st November 1997 |
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