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 by Stephen Oachs |
| The mystery surrounding Web marketing |
| is enough to make any
Internet euntrepanuer throw in the towel. Articles are published everyday with magical
claims and guaranteed success tips to push your search engine listing to the top of the
heap. Tricks like Dublin Core, Invisible text, phantom pixels and the list goes on and on.
With spammers on the rise, and search engines taking a firm stance against the practice,
you may find yourself in the Internet alley with no listing at all. As with anything in life, shortcuts will often land you poor
results. Claims of high relevancy scores using these digital enhances are vapid at best.
True indexing results come from doing you homework and having a general understanding of
the information sought by indexing robots. Below is an outline of general indexing
practices that works as a template to prepare your site for indexing to the top 7 engines.
(Studies have shown that 95% of search traffic flows through the top 7 search
engines/directories: Yahoo, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos, HotBot, Webcrawler, Infoseek) |
| Indexing principles |
| TITLE tags, META tags
and Visible text These three elements make
up all the primary information a search engine will ask of you. It is very important to
follow strict guidelines in each of these elements to ensure you maximize your relevancy
scores but avoid the perils of spamming.
Title tags are paramount since almost every search
engine calls upon them for information of one type or another. The end users web browser
also looks at Title tags for book-marking information so it is crucial to include this tag
in your HTML documents. The Title tag must contain your business name and if you can
include a couple primary key words related to your site all the better.
Meta tag relevancy has long been a debatable issue.
Meta data, born from Dublin Core, has many useful supporting elements when it comes to
indexing a web site. Using two primary Meta attributes, keywords and description, will do
no harm if a non-Meta spider indexes your page, and will do wonders for you site if
present when Meta based spiders crawl your pages.
Content is king. A statement that rings true
especially when your site is indexed by search engines that place value on the visible
text it encounters. It is equally important that your site content be as descriptive and
informative as your Title and Meta information. Your site should provide the same
information through out each of these areas in order to establish the best possible
relevancy score with every search engine or directory you choose to index with. |
| Start counting your characters |
| There are no two search
engines that function in the same manner and as a result each has its own requirements for
information and how much it will tolerate. Below are guidelines to follow that will allow
your data to conform best to the top 7 listing services.
|
| Content is king |
| Content is two fold,
text and presentation. If you create traffic flow to your site, your next challenge is to
keep them interested in what you have to offer. The next paragraph is food for thought
when creating your site. The goal is to
provide the client with a site that is viewable by the largest possible audience knowing
of course that the variables for viewing the site are vast. Internet Technology is
providing the end user with a site that produces the desired results. More visitors equal
a higher likelihood of success. Internet Technology is really the antithesis of the
stereotype. The stereotype being that Internet technology is all about providing features
and functionality that we take for granted in software multi-media products. The real
challenge is not how appealing we can make the site, but how appealing can we make the
site for everyone who chooses to visit.
Article by Stephen Oachs, of Insights International . If you
have any questions about this article or would like more information on website design,
e-commerce, or promoting your website drop him a line at (888) 465-9957 or send an email. Stephen will
be happy to answer any and all of your questions.
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