 Greg
Gore is Vice President of Praxis International, Inc.Technical Training, Consulting, and Publishing since 1988
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Using
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engines can be automated or can be hand indexed. Automated search
engines use "spiders" to "crawl" from web page to
web page using links. The spider software looks at the content of your
site, records the content, and then, another software program ranks the
site according to keyword relevance. The criteria the various search
engines use to rank for relevance is proprietary information. Eventually,
the search spiders should find your site. However, this can literally
take months. One way you can help spiders do their work when they reach
your site is to use "meta tags" for your site title, keywords,
and description. Meta tags are HTML code inserted near the top of a web
page. The code itself is very simple and is written like this for the
title: <TITLE>Insert your title here</TITLE>. The meta tag
code for keywords is:<META NAME=
"keywords" CONTENT= "list your keywords separated
by commas">. The meta tag code for description is: <META
NAME= "description" CONTENT= "write your description
here.">. Be aware that meta tags are not a panacea, because not
all search engines use them. Yahoo
is an example of a hand-indexed search engine. Because it is selective,
Yahoo is a site favored by many as the premier site on which to be
listed. Sites must be
submitted to Yahoo for consideration to add to its database. To submit a
site to Yahoo or one of the other search engines, go to the home page of
the search engine site and scroll down to the bottom where you will find
a link that says something similar to "Add URL" or "Add
Site" or "Submit Site." You will find that some sites
offer free submission, some charge a fee, and some offer both free and
fee submission options. Manually
submitting your site to the top 10 or top 25 search engines is time
consuming. Moreover, because there are literally thousands of search
engines (a recent visit to www.searchengineguide.com
listed 3675 search engines), services are available that will submit
your site to the major search engines and to many other search engines
as well. Two of these services are www.selfpromotion.com
and www.ineedhits.com.
Selfpromotion.com describes itself as a "share" site. That is,
selfpromotion.com submits your site to a selection of search engines for
free, and if you like the results, you are encouraged to send in a
donation. The site also offers a wealth of useful information about
search engines. Ineedhits.com will help you submit your site for free to
27 search engines. Until March 31, for a payment of $2.50, you can
submit your site to 300 search engines. (After March 31, the price is
$9.95) This site also offers various other plans to help you promote
your web site. Whether
you submit your site yourself or get someone else to do it, you need to
think carefully about your title, keywords, and description. One very
useful free site is www.keywordcount.com,
where you can compare your site's keywords and description with the
keywords and description of your major competitor (or any other site.).
Also, be sure to visit searchengineguide.com, which was mentioned above.
Searchengineguide.com regularly updates and posts the top 500 keywords
being used in searches. Another
useful site is www.websmostlinked.com.
Here you can see the most popular sites on the web ranked by how often
users click onto these sites. __________ The Greg Gore Web Site on Computers and the Internet (www.GregGore.com) This
column was published in the Daily Local News, West Chester, PA on March
28, 2001. Greg Gore can be
reached at gg@GregGore.com. ©
2009 by Greg Gore. All rights reserved. |