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It's the hottest topic on the net:
how to get your site to the top of the list.
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Everywhere you look there's somebody giving you advice, but you know
what? Most of that advice is theory passed on from person to
person. Not many people have tested their own theories over a long period
of time to see what works and what doesn't. I have.
All the advice you're about to read is from first hand experience.
I worked all this out with a lot of trial and error.
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The Basic Principle
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There are two types of search engine: the deep engine,
like Alta Vista and Infoseek, which sends out a robot to your site and
saves the info from your page itself, and then there's the standard
engine (also known as "directory") which doesn't use any info from your
page, only the info which you give it by way of an online submission form.
The most important of all search engines is Yahoo! and it's absolutely
vital to take extreme care when you submit to this one. |
Building A Keyword List
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Before you touch anything, you have to decide which words
are best suited to the topic of your site. Think carefully because the
key is to match the words your potential visitors are likely to type into
a search engine. Users tend to be fairly general with their initial searches,
then they narrow it down. So, if you have a pet shop the keyword 'pets'
is going to be more powerful than 'dogs'.
You can choose between a short, powerful keyword list which is likely
to put you high up but with only a limited number of words, or you can
have a long list which will put you slightly lower, but with a broad
spectrum of keywords.
Now that you've got your list, here's what to do with it...
Tips On Keywords And Descriptions
- Describe your Web site, not your company. The name
of the game is getting Web site visitors. Once they've arrived you
can talk to your heart's content about your annual turnover or whatever.
- Empathise with your users. Think what they might be searching
for, which may not even be something you're actually selling but may
be related to something you're selling. The user may thank you for
selling them something better. The keywords are more important than
the facts!
- Test your keywords. Search for each one on any search engine
and then examine the top few Web sites to see if there are any other
keywords you might like to add to your list.
- Plurals: always use the plurals of keywords. A user will
search for 'pet' or 'pets'. Your keyword 'pets' will match in both
cases.
- Common words: don't use words like 'web', 'internet', 'services'
- if you think one of your words might be a common one, test it on
Alta Vista. If the response is something like:
ignored 19,152,057 services
then don't use that keyword!
- Keyword phrases: your keywords don't have to be one word.
Users often search for well-known phrases like 'web site promotion'.
If your topic has a natural phrase like this, use the words together
as one keyword phrase - in your META tag (enclose all 3 words between
two commas), TITLE and even URL.
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Preparing Your Page
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The first thing to do is to 'doctor' your page so that when
the deep engine robots visit, they think "Hey, this is a powerful page
with strong keywords, I'll list this one high!"
There are a number of aspects of your site (some of which you may
not even have considered) that you have to 'load' with keywords:
- TITLE
- I'm talking about <HEAD> <TITLE>The Page Title</TITLE>
</HEAD> - not the first heading on the page itself.
The first, and most powerful aspect. Keep it short, keep it interesting
and put one or two (no more) of your most powerful keywords in it.
Do the same for your subpages. Never put a looong sentence in your
TITLE.
Don't put too much effort into trying to have a title which is
low alphabetically. If it's naturally low, then good, but it's becoming
of less and less importance.
- META Tags
- Not as powerful as most people seem to think. Important, nevertheless.
You can put a lot of keywords in your META tag, but don't repeat more
than a couple of times otherwise you'll get penalised and sent to
the bottom of the list:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The Page Title
>/TITLE>
<META Name="description" Content="Something interesting. Keywords
not required at all. 150 characters maximum.">
<META Name="keywords" Content="Your keywords, the whole list
repeated twice in entirety, each word separated by a comma.">
</HEAD>
- BODY
- The number of keywords isn't important, only the percentage
compared to the rest of the page. I've seen pages with nothing on
them but a couple of graphics, and no META tags. They had one word
in the TITLE and a few words of text in the BODY. Very small pages.
But they were right at the top of the list for the keywords used.
- URL
- Use it! Not many people do because they like to have a short, "cool"
URL. If your site is www.johnsmith.com and it's about pets, you can
still have your site as www.johnsmith.com, but you can copy the whole
site to www.johnsmith.com/pets/ and submit only this URL to the search
engines. Keep the main URL to put on your printed material and to
tell your friends.
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Submission Time
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Warning
Make sure your page is absolutely perfect and that you've double-checked
everything before you submit. Once your page is listed it's very difficult
and time-consuming to change it. Likewise, take great care over the
listings you submit to the directories.
- Tip
- Submit all your pages, including your sub-pages whenever
possible. Yes, the robots will crawl the rest of your site if you
only submit the home page, but it can take longer.
- Categories
- On the standard engines, like Yahoo!, choose the most relevant
categories. Then eliminate the ones that are deep in the hierarchy
(ie. have long names). When you have the best two, put one in the
main category box, and put the other in the 'additional categories'
box. Yahoo! definitely won't let you have more than two. You'll be
lucky if you can get more than one.
- Yahoo!
- Get this one right and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank.
If you've done your TITLE right, it should have the two most powerful
of your keywords in it, so put the same title for your Yahoo caption.
If the main heading in the BODY of your page doesn't match the title,
change it so it does! The Yahoo! staff always check sites before
they list them. I'm not kidding. And they're very sharp at spotting
questionable tactics. Anything dodgy and you'll get a rejection message.
It's the toughest of them all but also the most rewarding.
For the description, use about ten words to avoid it getting chopped
short by the staff, and include as many keywords as possible whilst
still making a sensible sentence. Nobody said it was easy.
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