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 Website
Promotion Tips - authored
by Jim Rhodes
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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.
- 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.
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- 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
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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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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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