Search engine tips and tricks
If you want to be at the top or near the top of search engines
listings, you need to tailor your page to search engine liking. Here are some
suggestions for doing this.
1. Content.
Use fresh content. If you want people to come to your site and keep coming
back, you need to give them a reason to. That reason is content. The fresher the content
the better and the more reasons your vistor will have to visit your site and the sooner
they will return.
2. Use key words in the
<TITLE> of your document to make it as descriptive
as possible. For clarification purposes, the <TITLE> tag is what a browser will
display in its title bar and is not simply the first line of HTML that shows up on your
page. This is the first thing that search engines as well as people visiting your site
will see. Try to use a few of your most powerful and meaningful keywords in your title.
Choose them carefully, and make your title short and to the point, not overly long and
rambling.
3. Descriptive page
text help as well. Text search engines assign
greater relevancy to text located at the top of the page than to text located in the
middle or at the bottom of the page. The search engine assume that web page authors will
present most important information first. If your page has a main graphic at the top,
you should place some descriptive text either underneath or beside the image. The
search engines will index this text and assign it a high level of relevancy.
4. Use <META>
tags. What are meta tags? A meta tag gives a
spider specific information, such as keywords or site summaries, about a site. In Web
lingo, meta tags are defined as "information about information." These tags are
part of the HTML code. They stay behind the scenes -- the end user never sees them. A Web
author may surround sentences, even whole paragraphs, with these tags. Certain spiders
then read the information in the tags as a way to help them index the site. Currently only
Alta Vista and Infoseek use deep search engines that recognize meta tags. Although the use
of these tags are very important, they are not nearly as powerful as your title.
Your meta tags should appear between the <head> </head>part of your document.
Here is example of how to use meta tags:
<head><title> page title with powerful keywords</title>
<meta name="description" content=" type your
description here - 20 words or less">
<meta name="keywords" content="type your keywords here - 200 words or
less" >
</head>
5. Select your keywords
carefully. This is a major step to a
successful website promotion. When you are deciding on your keywords, it is important
to think like your customers. Imagine that you're one of your customers and you're looking
for your type of product or service, what keyword(s) would you use to do your search?
Chances are, your customers will use the same. Think of as many keywords as you can that
even slightly resembles the type of product or service that you are offering. List
these keywords in order of priority. Take these keywords and visit all the major search
engines and do searches for each one and see what comes up. Pay special attention to the
description in each of the top listings and chances are your likely to find some new
keywords you may not have thought of.
Here is some other guidelines for choosing your key words:
- Try to limit your keywords to 200 words or less.
- Don't repeat the same keyword more than 3 times
- Don't list the same keywords next to each other (you could possibly get penalized for
this).
Another thing you to will want to do when selecting your key words
is add the letter 's' to the end of all your keywords (or add the appropriate plural form
to the word). The reason this is important because most people search for keywords in
their plural form. If all your keywords are in their singular form, your page will not be
listed when they search for in the plural form. The plural form will allow your page to be
listed when both the singular and plural forms are searched for.
6. Change your titles
regularly. By doing this, each time the
robot/spider visits your page and sees a different title it will think it's a new page and
treat it as such by indexing it again. Now you have more than one listing for the same
page! By changing your title periodically your page can be resubmitted and re-indexed
multiple times by the search engines. Use careful judgement when resubmitting the same
page several times. Some consider this use of the search engines impolite or unfair.
7. Don't use frames. Most of the major search engines can not follow frames links.
If you must use frames make sure you use meta tags and or submit multiple pages to
the search engines that do not have frames but have text links instead.
8. Be honest. One of the most important things to do is to be honest. Don't
try to spam or trick search engines, because in the end this will most likely backfire and
you won't be included on the search engine. The best thing is to actually use relevant
keywords you want your page to be searchable under.
For more advanced and in-depth information, click here for the
"Search Engine Secrets" report.
