Re: Search Engines

At 05:37 PM 1/22/98 -0300, Alberto Russo wrote:
snip...
>Is there any way to get your web sites better indexed on the most
>popular search engines (I mean Yahoo, Lycos, Webcrawler, etc.) ?
>We are working for some people who is worried about how they appear (or
>they don't appear) in relationship to other competitors, and that's the
>origin of my question.

I posted this to the HTML list last November. It should help:

Go here: http://searchenginewatch.com/features.htm

for a great roundup on how various search engines index sites. It describes
which use Meta Tags and which don't, plus other useful information. Yahoo is
not included because it is based soley on the description you provide when
you submit your URL.

I've had good success using the following strategy for indexing:

1. Use as exact a <TITLE> for your page as you can. Taking my site as an
example, I use only the word "Endura" as my welcome page title. That way,
people searching for Endura in an engine are likely to get this page back as
a 100% hit. If my title was "Endura Software for Distribution Management"
the relevancy rating would be lower. Another example, one of my product
pages is titled simply "Order Entry" vs "Endura Order Entry" or some other
longer name that might lower the relevancy.

2. Use META tags for "description" and "keyword", but avoid spamming
(repeating words several times) or you'll be penalized:

  a. <META Name="description" Content="Your description here."> 
     Tip: Keep the description under 200 characters.

  b. <META Name="keywords" Content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, etc."> 
     Tip: Avoid repeating words too much to avoid spam penalties.

3. Put important information first on your page. Also, put relevant keywords
into headings, especially the first <H1> heading. The first paragraphs on a
page are also given relevance in indexing, so make sure you say exactly
what your site is early.

4. Submit your URL to the major search engines regularly, to insure they
index any updates to your site. And check up on your listings regularly.

New Advice (Since I just resumbitted my pages a few days ago):

5. Read the submission procedures for each search engine carefully. Some
sites only want your base URL (http://www.enduracorp.com, for example) and
will spider (index) your whole site, while others require you to submit
every page you want indexed individually (Infoseek does). Other sites say
that they'll spider your site, but only one or two links deep. Therefore,
I've submitted deeper URLs for major areas separately.

6. Yahoo is a special case, since you give them your own description. That
description (limited to 200 characters, I think) should be packed with all
the key words you think people will search you out for, yet should attempt
to be readable sentences. Also, choose your Yahoo category carefully.



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Chuck Evans                       E-mail: chuck.evans(at)enduracorp.com
MarCom Coordinator & Webmaster     Phone: (206) 522-0055
Endura Software                      Fax: (206) 522-0053
115 NE 100th St                      Web: http://www.enduracorp.com
Seattle, WA 98037                 Member: HTML Writers Guild
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