The Search Engine Game
The Search Engine Game
For this article, I shall focus on how to best prepare your site to be noticed by the robots and "spiders" the search engines use to catalogue Web pages in their databases. These spiders and robots are simply automatic programs that go out and scour web pages periodically looking for titles and words on them by which they'll be classified and listed.
The keys to getting noticed by these programs, and thus placing prominently,
have to do with your <TITLE> tag, "Meta" tags which -- like the "Title"
tag --- are
invisible to your visitors, and your use of identifying key words within
those Meta tags and in the body of your Web page.
The "TITLE" tag is the most important on your page because almost every search engine has its spider or robot read this tag. Those who classify pages by key word, or words, in their databases will respond better to your page if the words used in the title tag appear early on your page, as should your key words.
If you are going to use Meta tags, which I'll demonstrate below, it
also helps to have as many of your self-identified key words in the first
paragraph of text.
Some spiders will only "crawl" the first paragraph or two of your Web
page. Thus, it's important to have as much identifying information up front
as possible.
I have found it incredibly helpful to have a key word or two from the title tag up among the topic headers.
When you consider that there are literally hundreds of search engines out there, each with its own theory on how to classify Web pages, its best to put as much of your "punch" up front as possible.
Before I demonstrate placing meta tags on your page, I want to say something about keywords. Back in the early days of the Web, keywords were king. It became well known that almost every search engine used self-identified "key" words to classify and list pages.
That was ruined by the keyword spammers who used tags with strings of
the same keyword like "sex, all about sex, hot sex, wild hot sex, sex all
the time, sex, sex,
sex." Soon a number of search engines, like Infoseek, decided to ignore
the keywords meta tags altogether. Even now, most of the programmers at
the major search engines regularly change how their robots cull pages for
identification. So, as you will read in Robin's exhaustive ,article on
search engine placement tomorrow, no rule for getting your page listed
prominently is universal or hard and fast.
Also remember that search engines periodically purge their listings,
so it pays to visit sites like Web
Promote regularly and read their conferences on the latest
search engine practices.
Now to placing meta tags on your Web pages. Meta tags are lines of code
that you put between the <HEAD></HEAD> tags at the top of your HTML
page or pages so that robots know more about your content. In these tags,
which provide NAME, DESCRIPTION, and KEYWORD information about the page,
you get a
chance to describe your site and the particular page. Your choice of
words will help the spider or robot give the search engine feedback about
your placement in its database.
Here's an example of what a common meta tag would look like on your page:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Kewl Site - Information about Tags</TITLE>
<META HTTP-EQUIV= "Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Information about Tags by Kewl
Webmaster">
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="My Kewl Site, E-zine, webmaster resources,
information about tags, Kewl Webmaster, meta tags, keywords, page identity,">
<META NAME="DISTRIBUTION" CONTENT="global">
<META NAME="rating" CONTENT="General">
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="15 days">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="ALL">
</HEAD>
In this example I've placed two "META NAME" tags that you won't see on all Web pages. Those are "rating" and "revisit-after". Most Webmasters I know don't use these two tags, and some have asked why I do.
They don't hurt, and they just might help.
Number one, by rating the page you make it more likely to be accepted by search engines like GO. They don't want adult content in their database, so this is a way of letting their spider know if your content is or is not intended for mature audiences. For those robots that still read meta tags, I like using the "revisit-after" meta tag because it *might* help keep my site from being bombarded with as many hits from spiders and robots as from real people.
By now, most of you are familiar with the "false" page impressions left
by the robots and spiders. To minimize these I inform the intelligent spiders
how frequently they need to check for major updates of my page content.
If the spider isn't "intelligent" --- meaning it isn't programmed to respond
to his command --- I have lost
nothing.
I hope these simple page preparation tips help you to bring more visitors
to your website. Come back tomorrow when Robin Miller will show you how
to get the best
placement possible in the search engines and directories.
