|
|||||||||||
PREVIOUS PAGE • SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER • CLIENT LOGIN Improve your search engine rankingI receive at least a dozen spams a week from companies that promise to make my Web site #1 in all the search engines. Some of them want a few bucks to do it, while others say they'll charge several hundred dollars. Or several thousand. If you're inclined to use one of these spam-advertised services, just pick the cheapest deal. That way you'll waste less money. On the other hand, if someone offers to analyze your Web site and then to make specific recommendations to improve your search engine placement, keep listening. The spammers will typically do one of these:
The big-bucks optionSome search engine operators sell banners that are linked to searches. You pick a business category (real estate, for example) and when someone conducts a search that involves real estate, your banner displays along with the results. This is analogous to space ads in the Yellow Pages - the larger the ad, the closer it is to the front of the category. Buying banner ads in search engines works, but it's expensive. It's not the right solution for most smaller companies. Think your way to better placementMost search engines compare several page elements when they produce search results. They look at meta tags, the title tag, the description tag, and the first 200 words or so of visible text. If someone is looking for a marketing site and uses the word "marketing", the search engine will bring back pages that have one or more instances of the word "marketing". So if "marketing" is an important word for your site, it should be in the title, it should be in the meta tags (more important words belong early in the list), it should be in the description, and it should be in the first 100 words of visible text on the page. "Visible text" means text the search engine can see. It's possible to place white text on a white background and make the text so small that humans can't see it. You might think that it would be clever to create some white 1-pixel-high text on a white background and fill it with "marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing, marketing" but this is a very bad idea. Search engines consider this spamming and will drop your listing to a lower spot in the results (and may drop your site entirely). Playing this game with search engines will backfire for two reasons: Most look for repetitions of key words and virtually all consider instances of that or the use of identical colors for text and background to be prima facie proof of spamming. Choose a few good wordsIt's critical that you take time to think about the words you'll use in these 4 critical locations: Meta tags should consist of no more than 1000 characters. The description should be 25 to 50 words. The title tag appears on the browser's title bar, so it must be concise - certainly no more than 100 characters. For many search engines, the words in the title are given the most weight, so choose them with extreme care. The first 200 to 300 words are heavily weighted. Once you've selected the right words for each of these locations, you can buy a program that submits your site to any combination of the estimated 3500 search engines. Keep in mind, though, that about half a dozen of these 3500 sites handle the vast majority of search requests. They're the ones you've heard of - probably the ones you use: Alta Vista, Yahoo, Northern Light, Lycos, Excite, Google, Infoseek, Inktomi, HotBot, and such. You'll get better results if you visit each of these primary search engines to find out how they work, what information they want, and how to submit the information. Yahoo is cantankerous and can easily take several months to add a listing. This is because Yahoo staffers actually visit every single site that's submitted before adding it. This is a nice touch, but it means that you'll never find timely information via Yahoo. It's the main reason that I use Yahoo only as an act of desperation. Some search engines look for links to your site from other sites. The more links the engine finds, the higher it will rank your site. That's one reason you should do everything you can to convince other Web site owners to set up links to your site. Some also rank your site in terms of "freshness" by examining the file creation dates of files on your site. This is a good reason to change some information regularly. Some of those 3500 search engines I mentioned serve specific industries. Some serve specific countries. If your industry has trade organizations with search engines or directories, make sure that your Web site is listed there. After you've submitted your information, go to the search engines and conduct a test. Enter the words that you'd expect people to enter when they're looking for your company or the services you provide. Then examine the pages of the sites that appear higher in the listing than your site, using "view source" to read their meta tags and other descriptive elements at the top of the page. Link trading and other strategiesFind people at businesses that complement yours and ask them to provide a link to your site (and you should provide a reciprocal link to their site). A home improvement company might have links to landscaping services or architects. An independent garage could offer links to auto detailing services. Think the people who buy your products or use your services. Then expand your thinking to include the products or services these people will probably also be in the market for. Cooperation is the key. Beware frames! If you use frames, be sure to include title information on each page even though the title won't be visible when the page appears within a frame, and include a link on every page to your home page. If a search engine sends a searcher to a page that's supposed to be in a frame, and this is not uncommon, you'll make it possible for the visitor to find your home page. Every graphic should have a descriptive alt tag. Those who surf with images turned off will see only the alt tag text where an image would be. While that alone is a good reason for using alt tags, here's an even better one: By carefully constructing alt tags with some of your most important key words, you'll improve search engine placement. How these things workMost search engines try to crawl as much of every site as they can. This means that the engine inspects your index.html page and every link on that page. It then follows all links (local and remote) and all of the links it encounters along the way. The goal is a complete map of your site. This, by the way, is a good reason to avoid dynamic content if you have any other options (e-merchants usually don't have a choice). Webmonkey compares this process to compiling a telephone directory by calling everyone you know and asking them to tell you the names and numbers of everyone they know, then calling those people to ask for the names and numbers of all the people they know. How easy would that be? Would you miss a lot of names and numbers? You can make it easier for search engines to crawl your site by handing the search engine a list of every page you would like it to index. When a search engine encounters your special crawler page, it will find every page on your site because every page on your site will be just one hop from this specialized page! The crawler page need not be one that's intended for use by the public, so give it a name that's not immediately obvious. You'll give this particular URL only to search engines. Also keep in mind that as of mid-2000, there were an estimated 1,000,000,000 Web pages (yes, one BILLION). No search engine has every Web site indexed. Even the largest have no more than 20 to 30%. So every time a search engine adds new information, it drops old information. That's why you should submit site information regularly. Submit early and oftenI've seen claims that some search engines will penalize those who submit information more than once, but I've not been able to confirm this. Weekly or monthly re-submissions seem reasonable today. For each search term, consider adding a specific page that's optimized for that term. The title should be short and contain only key words specific to that particular page. Is this a lot of work? Yes. Will it improve your site's ranking? Yes. When people find your site near the top of the results list, they still have to select your site from the other 10 sites listed on the page. Search engines generally display the title tag and your description tag. Take the time needed to choose your words carefully. Sell the searcher on clicking your link. Search engines keep track of how often people click through to your site and this is used in determining rankings, too. As more people click through to your site, the search engine learns that your site is a good site. It shows up higher on subsequent searches. Success builds on success. And speaking of that, your Internet presence provider should give you access to logs that show, among other things, which search engines are sending the most traffic to your site and what search terms users plugged in to find your site. This is valuable information that you can use to fine-tune your search engine submissions. |
|
William Blinn Communications - All Rights Reserved |
|||
 |
|
|
|