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Establishing a strong presence in the
Internet's major search engines and directories is absolutely
crucial to building your Web hosting brand. Here's how to make
sure your Web site is up to the task.
In order to succeed in today's
ultra-competitive Web hosting market, getting listed in the
Internet's major search engines and directories is not an
option - it's a must. On today's Internet, search portals and
success go hand in hand; therefore, it's extremely important
to pay a great deal of attention to them.
There are typically two ways to get listed in
most search engines and directories: manual or automatic
submission. Like their titles imply, manual submission entails
actually visiting the search engine/directory and submitting
your Web site to them; automatic submissions use software to
speed up the process.
But as search sites continue to develop, they
are becoming increasingly wise to automatic submission
programs. In the past, many have unfortunately used them to
try and trick search engines through various methods that
involved spamming; therefore, it is highly recommended that
you manually submit your Web site to search engines whenever
possible.
The same line of thinking should apply when
considering services that claim to submit your site to 100+
search engines at a time. Most of these services disregard one
important fact: 85 of those 100 search engines are not
important, and will be responsible for little (if any) traffic
directed to your site. The only way to guarantee your pages
being indexed is to do it yourself. What's more, some search
engines have now developed a system whereby you need to enter
a "code" displayed on your computer in order to submit a site,
thereby preventing submission programs from working. Altavista
has been doing this for quite some time, and now limits
submissions to five pages per session.
Tuning Up Your Site for Submission
Before submitting your site to any search
engine or directory, you'll want to make sure that your Web
site is well-optimized for the search engine spider or editor
that will (hopefully) visit your Web site after submitting it
to them. And ensuring your site is well-optimized begins with
your site's HTML tags and site text.
There are a number of HTML tags you should
know if you wish to show up anywhere near the top in search
engine rankings. These are the TITLE tag, the ALT tag, and the
META tag series.
The TITLE Tag
This tag, which is placed at the top of every
HTML document, provides a summary of what your site is about
to search engine spiders. It is crucial to try to include as
many search terms in the title in a relevant manner.
The ALT Tag
While this tag is not often used any in any
practical manner any longer (it was originally intended to
display text when an image took too long to load and a user
aborted, or if there were errors on the page), it is very
important to engine spiders. Most of them will index the text
within an ALT tag, so use it to your advantage and enter some
keywords there as well.
META Tags
META tags are placed between HEAD and BODY
tags at the beginning of an HTML document to inform spiders
about the content of your site. These tags are crucial to your
ultimate search engine ranking; spiders try to determine what
your site is about and how to categorize it in their database
largely through what your META tags say.
The Various Types of META Tags
While there are many META tags in HTML, search
engines are usually only concerned with the keywords tag and
the description tag.
The keywords tag tells search engine bots what
keywords you want your site to be associated with. The
description tag contains a short description of your site that
is often displayed in the engine's search results. Try to keep
your descriptions short, as many bots will stop reading after
50 to 100 characters (although some will read up to 1000 or
so).
Here's an example of how to use META tags.
Let's say, for example, your site focused on offering
dedicated servers:
<head>
<title>Company Name: Dedicated Web hosting packages</title>
<META name="description" content="Dedicated Web hosting..
cheap!">
<META name="keywords" content="dedicated web hosting, web
host, dedicated server">
</head>
Most search engines will then display:
[your site's name]
Dedicated Web hosting.. cheap!
Not all search engines will recognize your
META tags. Some will read your ALT tags, or the first few
lines of text they encounter on your site and will index that
instead. It is therefore important to ensure that the opening
paragraphs of your site contain a description of what that
particular page is about. Also try to avoid repetition - make
sure your keyword sequences for your ALT and META tags differ.
This will make your listing more concise, increase the chances
of your site receiving a higher ranking, and ensure that the
bot does not think you are spamming it.
Once you've established what your META data
will be, make sure your Web site's text corresponds to the
keywords you have chosen. It is extremely important, however,
to ensure that the copy contained within your site is concise,
makes sense and is well-written; otherwise, search engine
spiders (and human directory editors, too) will conclude that
you are trying to trick them, and drop your site from their
index completely with little chance of re-instatement.
Other Important Tips
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Avoid password protected pages. Search
engine spiders will not follow them.
-
Try to avoid using clickable image maps as
menus. Many search engines ignore them.
-
Don't send engines to pages with redirects.
Many spiders will not follow them.
Be patient. Most of these engines and
directories will take four to six weeks to index your site in
their database. If you still don't see results after six
weeks, re-submit your sites. Failing that, you can even call
them or email them and find out why your site hasn't been
indexed.
Now that your site is properly optimized for
search engine spiders and human directory editors, you're
ready to submit it to the Internet's major search engines and
directories. Next time we'll take a look at the most important
ones to submit to and the most effective ways of doing so.
Get more information by reading Part 2:
"Developing Effective Search Engine Strategies"
- click here.
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