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Web Site Promotion : Search Engine Secrets

Search Engine Secrets

Although I can't claim to be the all knowing expert when it comes to the search engines, I have successfully promoted my fair share of pages. I have been on the Internet since 1995, and to date have had several million page views across the sites that we manage. Over the past 5 years, I have read many articles, analyzed many websites, and subscribed to countless newsletters on search engine placement, the following search engine tips reflect what I have learned from my research. If you find this material useful please tell a friend. If you would like to contribute to this article please tell me..

Why are the Search Engines so important?

Estimates are that 80 to 90% of the traffic your website receives will come from the search engines. This scenario however is a classic case of a good news/bad news dilemma. Here's the good news; Most search engines allow you to list your site free of charge, Free advertising that can account for 90% of your traffic is a great deal.

The bad news; The web has grown so large so fast that the search engines have a tough time keeping up with the new additions. As a result of this, no single search engine has a complete record of the Internet. In fact, even the best search engines may only index 30 to 40% of the Internet. Furthermore, your site will be competing with hundreds or thousands of other sites for prime placement on the search engines. Frankly if your site isn't listed on the first few pages of the search engines for a particular search phrase or term chances are you won't be found.

Lastly, as the search engines have evolved, the criteria they use to list a site has changed as well. Further complicating this fact, is that many of the search engines have been bought and sold, or merged with other search engines in an attempt to gain more traffic and more advertising dollars. Finally, now that search engines are considered Portals to the Internet., they are striving to keep potential visitors on their sites longer then ever and have actually started competing with the content providers they are indexing. As a result of this, I have found that over the years, the time spent maintaining and promoting our site has far exceeded the initial time spent creating it.

With these thoughts in mind, I have compiled a variety of resources that should help you in driving more traffic to your site.

How the search engines work.

Unfortunately none of the search engines work in the same fashion. They all have different criteria by which they rank your site. Some engines heavily rely on the use of meta tags to rank your site, others base their ranking on the first 200 characters on your webpage, yet others rely solely on the information that you provide them from filling in their online registration forms. Keeping these thoughts in mind as you write your webpages then, can go a long way in improving your sites findability.

What do the search engines say?

Rather then regurgitate what the search engines say, I'll let you read it directly from the horses mouth. The following links will take you directly to the respective search engines FAQ's. Be sure to bookmark us now so that you can easily return when your finished.

AOL uses the open directory project for site listings.
Alta Vista Accepts and uses meta tags as part of their relevancy ranking Offers fee and free submission to their search engine
Excite Doesn't accept meta tags, relies on page titles and the first 200 characters of a webpage.
go.com Formerly Infoseek. Is heavily weighted to the use of meta tags. Good well written tags can go along way on this engine.
HotBot Now owned by the Lycos network. Relies on a score derived from word frequency, title keywords, keywords in meta tags, and page length.
Lycos searches webpages with their robot and put out a composite score based on selected criteria including meta tags.
Open Directory Project AKA DMOZ used by many popular portal sites like AOL Search, AltaVista, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Netscape Search Relies on human reviewers to approve your site. Good looking well written sites will do best here.
Looksmart Charges $199 for submissions. You'll be listed in the LookSmart Network of partner sites, including Excite, MSN, Alta Vista, Time Warner, CNN, Net Zero and over 370 other ISP's. The LookSmart Network reaches 58 million people or 77% of US Web users
MSN. Relies on Looksmart for listings and accepts free submission for inclusion just with in MSN searches.
Yahoo! This is probably the largest of the search engines. I've read where it can be responsible for 70% of a sites traffic. Yahoo relies on your short description to list you in its database. They are slow to list you, and persistence may be required to get the job done.

FREE WebPosition Software Builds Traffic: Monitor Your Search Positions and Better Your Rankings! Just submitting your site is not enough!

What can you do to improve your rankings?

While we can make no guarantees, there are some tricks in the trade for improving your sites ranking on the search engines. Most of these tricks are fairly simple and involve fine tuning your page title, page content, and incorporating the use of meta tags into your source code. We'll also examine the use of doorway pages and various methods for registering your website to the search engines.

Page Titles are a major factor considered by most search engines. Your page title is not necessarily the first heading or graphic on your page, rather it is in your code. Your page title is what shows up in the top left corner of a web browser. In the case of this page it should say "Web Site promotion, tips and tricks to search engine success." Your title should reflect carefully selected keywords that accurately describe your webpage, and represents words your target audience might use to find your site. Your title html code should be placed in the head of your page before the body tags. Here is an example from this page.

<head>
<title>Web Site promotion, tips and tricks to search engine success.</title>
In this example, web site promotion and search engine are my targeted keywords. As you will see in the next example, we will narrow in on these words.

Page content As many of the search engines rely on what the reader sees at your site, meta tags and titles don't always work. For this reason it is important to use your keywords in the body of your page. I don't suggest repeating words just for the sake of the engines, but careful consideration of the keywords while you write your page can help a lot. If you scroll to the top of this page, you will see that I emphasize my 2 keyword phrases "web site promotion" and "search engine" without being overly obnoxious about it. After all we want people to return to the site once they find us. Lastly, as we move on to meta tags, you will see that we again stress the same keywords already introduced in the title and the body of the page.

Meta Tags are very effective bits of source code that dictate to certain search engines exactly how you want your site described and indexed.
Meta tags are placed in the head of your document before the title. The three common tags that I use are the description tag, keyword tag, and the revisit after tag.
The description tag should include a well written description of your page that subtly includes your keywords. This is what the search engines will display.
The keyword tag tells the search engines under what keywords you wish to be listed under. Again be sure to concentrate on your most powerful words or search phases.
The revisit tag instructs the search engines robots to revisit and re-index your page at specified time intervals. I usually set it to every 30 days.

Here is the meta source code for this page.
<html>

<head>
<meta name="description" content="The secrets of the search engines, a free discussion on optimizing your sites placement on the search engines.">
<meta name="keywords" content="search engine secrets, search engines, website promotion, meta tags, search engine secrets, search engines, website promotion, meta tags, search engine secrets, search engines, search engine secrets, search engines, website promotion, search engine secrets, search engines, website promotion, meta tags, meta tags, website promotion, meta tags, ">

<meta name="revisit after" content="30 days">
<title>Web Site promotion, tips and tricks to search engine success.</title></head>

A word to the wise, Do not use misleading meta tags it is unfair to your visitors and if you are caught by the search engines they will remove your URL from their database. Also, you will notice that I've repeated keywords in my meta tag, do not repeat keywords more then 3 or 4 times or your results will be diminished.

If you still need help with meta tags be sure to visit our free online meta builder you fill in the online form and it spits out the appropriate meta code.

A word about Yahoo: Yahoo does not rely on titles, content, or meta tags, rather they use an online form in which you input the page title and a short description. Furthermore, they only permit one URL per directory so make it count.

Submitting your site to the search engines!

Warning before proceeding to register your website be sure that you have properly prepared your webpages as described in the above section. It is far easier to do it right the 1st time then to try and correct your mistakes latter. Basically there are three methods for submitting your website to the search engines.

1) Manual submission, where you visit each of the search engines and independently submit your individual URL's. This method works well and is inexpensive, but is time consuming and requires much follow up to insure proper listing. I have found a program that simplifies this submission and follow up called Webposition. This program generates highly detailed reports on how well your site ranks using your various keywords. Webposition is available for a Free Demo

2. Site Submission Services, Try our new automated SimpleSubmit page. You can submit your site to 17 search engines within minutes and its absolutely free. Once you have submitted your site, You will be shown a confirmation page so you'll know right away whether your submission was accepted. .

3. Site Submission software

WebPosition Gold is the first and only product to combine all the following features designed to launch your Web site to the top of the search engine results.

Generates HTML pages designed to rank near the top of the search results
Analyzes your existing Web pages and gives plain-English advice on how to improve them.
Includes a simple, built-in HTML editor for fast and easy changes.
Assists in uploading your new and changed pages.
Submits your pages to the major search engines automatically.
Reports your positions on each search engine for each keyword you are targeting.
Tracks the number of visitors to your site, where they came from, and what keywords they used to find you.
And much, much more! Download a free trial version today!

Other sources for site promotion tips

MarketPosition offers a free monthly email newsletter with effective tips and insights on various types of Internet. marketing. It particularly focuses on the Search engines, offering little known insights you won't find anywhere else!

CNET features - how to - promote your Web site A very comprehensive well written series of articles on what it takes to make a successful website.

The Art Of Business Web Site Promotion Written by Jim Rhodes, A very detailed and well written guide to site promotion.

Search Engine Watch Written by Danny Sullivan. Very informative and up to date.

That's all for now. We hope you found this guide helpful and welcome your comments and success stories.

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