Promoting Your Website on the Search Engines
Establishing and maintaining your website may be a waste of time and money if your customers can't find it.
The key to getting more people to your site is an understanding of how the major search engines work.
If you found our site through a search engine, you'll know this works. We're delighted that Google has found us, and hope that we'll get the attention of the other important search tools soon.
Some search engines, like Yahoo and Google, require you to register your site with them. There are some sites that provide software that submits your site to many search engines.
Other search engines send intelligent agents out into the web to seek out pages, and index them.
Web pages can contain hidden descriptions and key words that are flags for the Search Engines. You can find those words by using the View Source command on your browser, and looking at the META tags.
There is an art in creating META tags, and especially in the list of keywords. While it may be tempting to include every word you can think of about your business, it may be much better to be more specific. What words would someone looking for you be likely to put into a search engine?
There are specific, but changing rules about how many words you can use. While some search engines allow 200 keywords to a page you may be much better off with just 20 or 30.
Consider putting those words in the order of priority.
If your business name is frequently misspelled, include the wrong versions.
It may be useful to check out the keywords used by your opposition.
Make the most of the title of each web page. It should be a description of the page, and also a branding statement about your business. The title is what turns up as the first line of your entry in the search engine results page.
Be aware that some search engines won’t list your site if it takes too long to load. And if your links don’t work some search engines may not list your site.
Flag as much of your unique content as possible through the URL, the META information, and the first words that are seen on the page.
The more pages that link to you, and from you, the more highly many search engines will rank you. An actively changing website is likely to attract more attention from search engines than one that stays the same.
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