Positioning
You can have the greatest site on the Net, complete with
the greatest design, online ordering, company information, links to your services, not to
mention the time and money you've put into it.
...Yeah? So what?
If nobody can find you, think of all that you've wasted.
It's like having a business and not being listed in the phone book.
Not only should you submit your site to as many search
engines, directories, and newsgroups as you can, you should also know a few tricks so you
rank higher in the search engines than your competition.
The first thing you should realize is that there are 2
separate things we'll talk about here. Search engines and directories are different. Excite is a search engine, Yahoo
is a directory - there are different ways to submit and considerations for each. We'll
cover directories briefly and then concentrate on search engines.
Directories
Directories typically get their content by web site authors
submitting their sites - You provide a category, site title, and description. You are then
listed alphabetically, so if your site title is AAA Office Supplies you'll be listed
before Zen Office Supplies. So if you were to search for "office supplies", AAA
would be listed much higher than Zen. Everything is alphabetical when you're dealing with
most directories.
Search Engines
All search engines are different. They all have different
algorithms that index your site. Some rely heavily on your <META> description and
keywords (listed in the HTML Tag
Reference), some can also rely on the first 1,024 characters of your site, your Title
(between your <TITLE></TITLE> Tags), and the number of times the keyword is mentioned in the
page.
The number of times the keyword is mentioned in the page
and title can make or break your listing. For example, if one page has the term
"amaretto coffee" listed once and another page has it listed 6 times, the latter
will rank before the other. People have realized this and taken advantage of it, which is
why some engines actually punish your listing for "keyword spamming".
- Put <META> descriptions in every page
- Put <META> keywords in every page
- Put a few keywords as well as an short but appropriate
description in your <TITLE>
- Include a few keywords in your Image ALT attribute, which is
a text description of the image.
Check out Search
Engine Watch for some great info about search engines.
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