Re: search engines (a little long)

--- Mike <emaleus(at)thegrid.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I am having a hard time getting listed in search engines. I have meta
> tags
> but still after several several months no listings.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> Mike
> www.bathbombfizzies.bizland.com

Yes, lots of suggestions. I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm fairly
certain that meta tags are mostly useless in a site. According to
Search Engine Watch and RankWrite (in my summation), the most important
things are to place your keywords prominently in your title (in the
title tags) and within the text of your page. After all that, add a
meta tag (and I don't believe it matters where in the header it falls.
GoLive 4 won't even let you control that.)

I'm not certain if these are commercial sites, but consider yourself
warned for HWG reasons. :-)
     http://searchenginewatch.com --That's the true storeroom of info  
http://www.rankwrite.com -- has very direct opinions on how to write
your contents for best ranking in search engines.

My top suggestions:
1)  get rid of frames. Some important search engines will not read the
contents of frames. I suppose you could make good NOFRAMES content...
but I think that's a pain.
2)  put your page's text in text, not in images --especially on the
home page
3)  write good text that makes sense and isn't marketing fluff.
Probably helps with human directory editors, certainly helps with _me_.
4)  Use your keywords -- the same ones you would've used in your meta
tag -- throughout your text. Supposedly, it helps to have these
keywords as high as possible in your HTML, and not merely high within
the visual appearance of the page. I don't know if that's true, but I
did rearrange my page's table to raise the main body of content.
5)  Use or list your keywords in the title! This is (apparently) as
important as using the keywords in the body. Title means title tags,
not the first heading on the page. I followed RankWrite's suggestion
for how to set up the title. I think this makes long long far too long
titles that look like crap, but it worked.

All of this produced good results for us-- I suddenly got a lot of
compliments from variuos people, including my boss, on how much better
our search results were. Unfortunately, I now have to put some effort
into returning us there (writing some new content, resubmitting the
pages)...

oh, yeah
6) don't try to trick the search engines. They've seen most or all of
the tricks, and will refuse to list the page or the entire site that
uses the tricks.

Sorry for the diatribe, but I spent far too much time studying this.

=====
Michael Greisman
Webmaster
Scanalytics, Inc.

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