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The_Search_Engine_Blues
| The Search Engine Blues
There's no easy way to talk about this without getting
frustrated…getting your site known on the net these days is a
most difficult task. Search engines are picky and their rules
change everyday, getting a top ten listing is almost impossible,
all those "submit to 5000 sites" are bull and other mediums are
just too expensive for the small businessman. It's a difficult
process to drive customers to your site but it can be done. It
is a question of getting someone on top of it - now. There are
lots of options available, it just depends on what you're
looking to accomplish. The single most important aspect to
consider in promotion and positioning of this nature is to make
sure that your website is functional. There is no use in having
a website at all if it just does not work. That is probably the
worst possible press out there - if word gets out that your site
has broken links all over the place and that images are
constantly missing, it does not look favorably on you or your
business. So make sure that all the links are working, all form
submissions do not return errors and all files are there in
their proper order. There should probably be minimum one person
in your team who does this check at least once a week. Next,
consider the META tag & keyword side of things. We've all heard
the horror stories about people abusing them to try and get high
rankings on search engines. That is, obviously, not such a good
idea. There is no easy solution to the search engine blues, but
consider using them, far too many people continue to ignore
them. Any web page generator program usually does not include
the creation of such tags but they are not that hard to do. A
META tag is what "talks" to search engine robots that index your
site. For the most part, you need to include them if you want
any indexing at all. The two most important tags are:
& . The description of your site should be no more than 15 -
20 words, it should be accurate and it should contain at least
some of your keywords. Keywords should have relevance. For
example, attempting to use the word "sex" 50, 000 times will not
win you the love of the search engines. Instead, think carefully
about what you think people would type in to find your services.
Now use those as your keywords. Do not worry…they'll change over
time to better suit your site's changing services, and as you
get better with it you'll know exactly what words work best. The
least technically important is the graphic design aspect
inasmuch as search engine indexing does not include the look and
feel in how they rank your site. However, from a surfer's point
of view, the graphics are probably the most important. If you
are focusing on repeat business as your primary income, then if
it does not look nice, people just will not come back. This
includes everything from the images found on your site, to the
layout and the usability (user-friendliness). Another brief
topic of concern is the importance of internet directories.
Should one take the time to submit their site to these
directories? Does anyone actually use them? The trend seems to
be going more and more towards the usage of these "man-handled"
search engines. Directories offer the public a pre-categorized
listing of searchable "channels" - far more organized than
search engines. Human eyes as opposed to the greatly feared
"spider" sort most of these directories so they tend to be much
more accurate. Directories also do not sort through the pages of
websites in the same fashion. They do not rely on meta tags as
much and do not "rank" sites they just list them alphabetically
so there is no competition for 1st place. Website promotion is a
HUGE responsibility and requires a lot of tweaking to only begin
to view even the smallest of changes. However, implementation of
these few, very basic techniques will definitely make your site
friendlier to the internet community at large.
About the author:
Jennifer Durocher Web Positioning Manager www.cityvu.com
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