Re: adding site to search engines

>>>>
I have added the meta tags:
<<<<

Meta Tags are so near worthless that they should be the very LAST thing
that is considered.

Basically, meta-tags were a good idea that was spammed to death, so of
the search engines that use them at all, don't grant them much weight.

What they DO place weight upon, in the page, are:

1) The HTML title

2) The first 200 to 400 characters in the web page.

Whatever keywords or phrases that you want to be found by had better be
in those.

For instance, figure out what keywords or phrases a customer would enter
in a search box to find your product. You should come up with about 7 to
10. Then narrow the list down to the one you think is most important.

For the home page, put your companies name and the phrase or keywords
that are most important.

Keep the length to about 80 characters. I try to shoot for about 64.

Ok, why 80 or 64? That many words are easy to scan. Remember, that when
your site comes up, this Title is the Link above the description, so you
need to pack maximum information plus into this.

Take the other keywords and craft them into the first couple of
paragraphs, if you can. When the page pops up, they need to make sense.
Writing Netcopy for those first few words a person sees is hard.  The
book Writing for the Web, Geeks Edition, is what I recommend if you are
basically a coder leaning to craft netcopy.

Let's look at your first paragraph:

We have:

thanks, taking, time, visit, exotic, auto, brokers, purchasing, agent,
internet, based, vehicle

(search engines discard articles and words like "to" and "for")

How do the words taking, time, visit, purchasing, agent, internet, based
help your customers find your product.

Heck, just take the words in the alt tags, and work those into the first
200 characters of the page.

While it will not help with search engine positioning, adding a
meta-description tag helps in better describing your product from the
search results page.

Many search engines will take your title for your site, and use that as
a link, and will take the meta-description tag and use it as the text
beneath that title/link. Again, it doesn't do anything for positioning,
but it can have everything in describing your service or product in such
a manner that will entice a user to click onto the link.

In notepad, do this:

Put your title on one line.

Put your description on the next line.

Then print it out. Look at it. Do those two things describe your product
correctly. Do they together give someone the information they need to
make the decision to click through?

Then do this again, only putting the first 200 characters of your web
page below the description.

Print it out again.

If someone sees the title and the description in a search result, and
they click on it, is the information expanded, does it fit, will it be
what they expect, which is to find even more information about your
site.

And of course, look at the title and 200 characters and circle your
keywords.

good luck
-- 


Jim Tom Polk -:- jtpolk(at)texas.net -:- http://camalott.com/~jtpolk/	
	''You might as well fall flat on your face as 
	  lean over too far backwards.''      --James Thurber--
   "The Universe is run by the complex interweaving of three 
          elements: energy, matter and enlightened self-interest." 
 		- G'Kar  "Survivors"                                  

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