Preserved Topic: Search Engines

www.frontiernet.net/~flrba

This is a website that I have close ties with, and have done work on. We orrigionally had the intentions of making this site a jumping spot for people familiar with the organization to be able to find further information.

They now want to have their page published on the search engines in order to get more play on the net.

I am not versed in any functionality of searh engines, and I want to be able to do a good job of having their site listed.

Any ideas on how to go about this??? It would help me out a lot if you have any feedback.

This is a book in itself <img border=0 align=absmiddle src="http://www.ozones.com/forum/smile.gif"> Meta tags (that go between the HEAD tags, are the biggest factor.

First, use a good description:

<META NAME="Description" CONTENT="Description goes here">

Some search engines arent as particular, but Yahoo IS. Yahoo gives you a little more play with how to add a site, but all still applies. Even though they say "under 25 words", I've learned from site marketers, 23 words is better.

Keywords are another valuable way:

<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="keywords,go,here">

Best if kept to 15-20. Use a comma between each one, and choose them carefully.

If you want the main page to be indexed, but no sub-pages, add this meta tag too:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="NOFOLLOW,INDEX">

if you want the engine to come back and re-index tha main page, use this tag:

<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="14 days">

You can change the days, thats 2 weeks. You can make it however many days you want.

Using this I've got my site tops in Yahoo for Flash tutorials (even thought they arent the greatest, lol) and a Disney site I run in the top 10, on most Disney World searches, and top 1-5 on alot of others.

I get anywhere from 200-500 hits a day on my site, and 200-400 on the Disney site. Not the best, but decent.

There's alot to engine placement, but playing with keywords and description is a big player.

Hope I helped, even if a little.


[This message has been edited by MobileBadBoy (edited 09-10-2000).]

if your asking about actually submitting the sites to search engines theres usually a link on the bottom of the search engine page and it takes around 6 weeks to get updated. Theres also programs that allow you to submit to multiple search engines at one time, very usefull I think.

Jestah you have any links?

Mobile thanks for the input very informative!

Yahoo claims to not index your meta tags. They are an index, not a search engine, they take your description and several other factors to rank you in their index.

The whole search engine game is changing all the time, all the majors have implemented ways around meta tag flooding (spamdexing) and sneakies like that and it's beginning to change the way everything works.

A few tips:

• <title>tag: Make every title of every page as descriptive as possible, using as many keywords as possible that are unique to the information presented on that individual page. This is a very important tag for ranking with many engines.
• alt= in your image tags is a great way to boost your keywords, I don't think any engines penalize for this technique and most encourage it. Plus you get the cool mouseover descriptions without using javascript.
• Use as many keywords in your body text as possible and as soon as possible (toward the beginning of the paragraph)
• Some engines give more weight to words that are encased in <b>or<i> tags
• Most of the big engines are now using link referral as a major point for assessing your placement. One method is number of links to your site and another is links from well-established or authoritative sites.
• Last but not least, be very careful when tempted to use some kind of autosubmission software, many engines penalize for it and may ban you from their index.

It's a whole other job, and it sucks (in my opinion) if you try to do it right. Tell them to pony up the dough or hire someone else to do the submitting.

Good luck bro

um just about any search engine you will find will have a link at the bottom, eh hotbot, infoseek(now go), etc... is that what you meant?

Jestah
ieJestah@hotmail.com
ICQ - 77252449

Altavista has a page with a lot of tips for bein well indexed.

http://doc.altavista.com/adv_search/ast_haw_wellindexed.html

I haven't tried it so I don't know how well it works, but you could always give it a try..

-nimraw
If you can't convince, confuse!

[This message has been edited by Nimraw (edited 10-10-2000).]

Yahoo are really trying to plot against me, ive had to submit web sites to them many, many times before they put the link up. What do I have to do Yahoo?

-Andrew Huppatz


Read Commuter Man!

Yahoo actually has people check out your site instead of spiders and they do the link ranking thing.

If your site stinks and no one links to it and it's new, it may take a long while to get listed. (Not implying anything with the stink comment there BTW) <img border=0 align=absmiddle src="http://www.ozones.com/forum/smile.gif">