MWS Newsletter: Volume 2, Issue 4

The text below is excerpted from the eBiz+ Exam Cram by Chris and Margaret Minnick.

How to Get Listed on Search Engines

Many businesses and Web sites claim to know the secret to getting your site shown more frequently and higher up in a list of search results. Some of the techniques these companies use actually do work and can be done by anyone. Other search engine listing tricks can actually be detrimental to your listings on search engines.

The first thing you need to know is that there is no magic bullet for making your site always show up in search results. If your site is about giraffes, it's simply not going to show up when someone searches for "plasma injector"--this would defeat the purpose of search engines altogether.

What you want to happen is for your site to show up in search results with a good-looking and informative listing when someone searches for a topic that your site contains information about. To this end, the most important things to have in the code of your Web pages are:

• Meaningful titles on all the pages
• A description of the site contained in HTML meta tags
• Relevant keywords, contained in HTML meta tags
• Text on the page that is related to the title, the description, and the keywords.
  

Meta tags are HTML tags that are designed to specify information about the contents of the document in a format that is usable by search engines and other programs, but that is not seen by people who access the site. Meta tags always appear in the header of an HTML document.

Techniques to Avoid

The types of search engine listing tricks that you want to stay away from include:

• Spamming search engines. Spamming a search engines is the process of submitting your site to the same search engines multiple times or submitting large numbers of pages on the same site to a search engine. Search engines are designed to follow links. So, as long as the page you submit contains links to the other pages on the site, you can be pretty sure that they will get indexed.
• Putting keywords on your Web page that don't have anything to do with your site. Some people think that if they fill their Web page with keywords that are frequently entered into search engines, they will get more traffic and therefore more customers. Even if this is true, it's important to keep in mind that Web sites that use this tactic are essentially lying to the visitor who goes to their site looking for warp field emitters and finds only information about microwavable plastic dishes.
• Coding excessive repetitions of keywords into your page in the hopes of tricking search engines into thinking that your page must be the most important page about that keyword because of how many times it's mentioned. This tactic used to work and was popular several years ago, but is more likely to get your Web site banned from a search engines than to improve your results today.

As boring as it might seem, the best way for a business to achieve results with search engines is to have a good Web site and to promote it aggressively but honestly on an ongoing basis, using a variety of different search engines listings, directories, and, most importantly, links from other sites .

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Chris Minnick
Minnick Web Services
www.minnickweb.com
www.ebookhost.com
Phone: 916-551-1453
Fax: 916-551-1454