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Web Site Promotion
Tips
from our guest author, Jim Rhodes:
Photo
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It's the hottest topic on the Net: how to get your site to the top of
the list.
Everywhere you look there's somebody giving you advice, but you know
what? Most of that advice is theory passed on from person to
person. Not many people have tested their own theories over a long
period of time to see what works and what doesn't. I have.
All the advice you're about to read is from first hand
experience. I worked all this out on my own with a lot of trial and
error, and as a result I have some severely successful sites to my
name. You can too.
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The Basic Principle
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There are two types of search engine: the deep engine, like
Alta Vista and Infoseek, which sends out a robot to your site and
saves the info from your page itself, and then there's the
standard engine (also known as "directory") which doesn't use
any info from your page, only the info which you give it by way of an
online submission form. The most important of all search engines is
Yahoo! and it's absolutely vital to take extreme care when you submit
to this one.
Building A Keyword List
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Before you touch anything, you have to decide which words are best
suited to the topic of your site. Think carefully because the key is
to match the words your potential visitors are likely to type into a
search engine. Users tend to be fairly general with their initial
searches, then they narrow it down. So, if you have a pet shop the
keyword 'pets' is going to be more powerful than 'dogs'.
You can choose between a short, powerful keyword list which is likely
to put you high up but with only a limited number of words, or you
can have a long list which will put you slightly lower, but with a
broad spectrum of keywords.
Now that you've got your list, here's what to do with it...
Tips On Keywords And Descriptions
- Describe your Web site, not your company. The name
of the game is getting Web site visitors. Once they've arrived you
can talk to your heart's content about your annual turnover or
whatever.
- Empathise with your users. Think what they might be
searching for, which may not even be something you're actually
selling but may be related to something you're selling. The user may
thank you for selling them something better. The keywords are more
important than the facts!
- Test your keywords. Search for each one on any search
engine and then examine the top few Web sites to see if there are any
other keywords you might like to add to your list.
- Plurals: always use the plurals of keywords. A user will
search for 'pet' or 'pets'. Your keyword 'pets' will match in
both cases.
- Common words: don't use words like 'web', 'internet',
'services' - if you think one of your words might be a common one,
test it on Alta Vista. If the response is something
like:
ignored 19,152,057
services then don't use that keyword!
- Keyword phrases: your keywords don't have to be one word.
Users often search for well-known phrases like 'web site promotion'.
If your topic has a natural phrase like this, use the words together
as one keyword phrase - in your META tag (enclose all 3 words between
two commas), TITLE and even URL.
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Preparing Your Page
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The first thing to do is to 'doctor' your page so that when the deep
engine robots visit, they think "Hey, this is a powerful page with
strong keywords, I'll list this one high!"
There are a number of aspects of your site (some of which you may not
even have considered) that you have to 'load' with keywords:
- TITLE
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I'm talking about <HEAD> <TITLE>The Page
Title</TITLE> </HEAD> - not the first
heading on the page itself.
The first, and most powerful aspect. Keep it short, keep it
interesting and put one or two (no more) of your most powerful
keywords in it. Do the same for your subpages. Never put a looong
sentence in your TITLE.
Don't put too much effort into trying to have a title which is low
alphabetically. If it's naturally low, then good, but it's becoming
of less and less importance.
- META Tags
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Not as powerful as most people seem to think. Important,
nevertheless. You can put a lot of keywords in your META tag, but
don't repeat more than a couple of times otherwise you'll get
penalised and sent to the bottom of the list:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>The Page Title>/TITLE>
<META Name="description" Content="Something interesting. Keywords
not required at all. 150 characters maximum.">
<META Name="keywords" Content="Your keywords, the whole list
repeated twice in entirety, each word separated by a comma.">
</HEAD>
- BODY
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The number of keywords isn't important, only the percentage
compared to the rest of the page. I've seen pages with nothing on
them but a couple of graphics, and no META tags. They had one word in
the TITLE and a few words of text in the BODY. Very small pages. But
they were right at the top of the list for the keywords used.
- URL
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Use it! Not many people do because they like to have a short, "cool"
URL. If your site is www.johnsmith.com and it's about pets, you can
still have your site as www.johnsmith.com, but you can copy the whole
site to www.johnsmith.com/pets/ and submit only this URL to the
search engines. Keep the main URL to put on your printed material and
to tell your friends.
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Submission Time
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- Warning
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Make sure your page is absolutely perfect and that you've
double-checked everything before you submit. Once your page is listed
it's very difficult and time-consuming to change it. Likewise, take
great care over the listings you submit to the directories.
- Tip
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Submit all your pages, including your sub-pages whenever
possible. Yes, the robots will crawl the rest of your site if you
only submit the home page, but it can take longer.
- Categories
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On the standard engines, like Yahoo!, choose the most relevant
categories. Then eliminate the ones that are deep in the hierarchy
(ie. have long names). When you have the best two, put one in the
main category box, and put the other in the 'additional categories'
box. Yahoo! definitely won't let you have more than two. You'll be
lucky if you can get more than one.
- Yahoo!
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Get this one right and you'll be laughing all the way to the bank. If
you've done your TITLE right, it should have the two most powerful of
your keywords in it, so put the same title for your Yahoo caption. If
the main heading in the BODY of your page doesn't match the title,
change it so it does! The Yahoo! staff always check sites
before they list them. I'm not kidding. And they're very sharp at
spotting questionable tactics. Anything dodgy and you'll get a
rejection message. It's the toughest of them all but also the most
rewarding.
For the description, use about ten words to avoid it getting chopped
short by the staff, and include as many keywords as possible whilst
still making a sensible sentence. Nobody said it was easy.
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Doing It The Easy Way
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You're thinking you've got a long haul ahead of you... all those
search engines...
Wrong!
As long as you've prepared your page as described above, all you need
to do is get yourself some killer software to actually make the
registrations. Something that you can try out first for free, and
then pay if you like it... something that's customisable for your own
site... something that has the peculiarities of each engine built
into it by a professional Web marketer...
You guessed it! Here it is:
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