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It's the hottest topic on the Net: how to get your site to the
top of the list.
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 on my own with a lot of trial
and error, and as a result I have some severely successful sites
to my name. You can too.
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The Basic Principle
- There are two types of search engine: the deep engine,
like Google, 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.
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Building A Keyword List
- 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
- 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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Doing It The Easy Way
- You're thinking you've got a long haul ahead of you... all
those search engines...
Wrong!
As long as you've prepared your page as described above, all
you need to do is get yourself some killer software to actually
make the registrations. Something that you can try out first for
free, and then pay if you like it... something that's
customisable for your own site... something that has the
peculiarities of each engine built into it by a professional Web
marketer...
You guessed it! Here it is:
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For More Info...
- If your thirst for knowledge isn't satisfied yet, check out
The Art Of Business Web
Site Promotion. You ain't seen nothin' yet.
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