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SEARCH ENGINE INFORMATION GLEANED FROM THE NET:
For a free online book, "Search Engine Tactics (v. 2.2), How to Submit Your Site and Come Up First in the Search Engines".
Due to the dynamism of the web, I have setup this as a links
page to site that specialise in this. Search engine information changes very
rapidly as technology progresses.
DOMAIN REGISTRATION:
So, you want your own name on the web. You can use
a "redirect service" that reroutes traffic from a short domain
name to your actual home page. Two are http://home.i.am/
and http://www.v3.com/v3home.asp. This may not
be enough, if you require a unique url for your web page. A Web
search for "domain name hosting" or "domain name registration" yields
numerous choices, products and services. Test for free if your name
is available or unused at the three generic domains, .com, .org and .net
using register.com. Registration
is currently not free as the Network Solutions Inc. (NSI) has the monopoly
on international domain registration and charges $70 to simply register
your domain for two years. Yes, its a ripoff and a racket, but currently,
this is the rule. So, got to www.netsol.com
and get your name registered. On top of this, you need some server to. Some sites offer a all in one package (see www.netnames.com),
offering to research, register and host your domain. Some registered
trademark holders may object to the name that you use, so also check if
you are about to infringe on a registered trademark. Start at "Infringe
upon a registered trademark?
" and "domain trademark/ owbership dispute issues
". As the
internet is so dynamic, the rules may change, so see what may be at www.icann.org
and www.internic.net. For more links
related to Web registration, see Ecotao's and for more on search links, see Ecotao's
SEARCH WITH SOME SEARCH ENGINES links.
GENERAL:
As search engines are not built to be the same,
your page ranking high in one search engine, does not guarantee high position
on another. As search engines usually crawl three levels deep when indexing
your site, try and ensure that all your web pages can be reached from your
home page within three clicks. Use TITLE tags and META description and
keyword tags, as most engines now use these. Make an effort to include
all META tag types: category, language, and robot revisit tags, and ALT
tags on all your images. Take care in designing your Meta tags. For example,
the TITLE tag text should start with a keyword that summarises the entire
page.Your TITLE tag sentence and META tag text should be made up
of keywords selected from the page. This will improve your search engine
ranking. Sites with frames must use good NOFRAMES tags since not all major
engines support frames (see above). If you don't, those engines will not
index your pages. If you use image maps, try and have a text links navigation
bar somewhere on the same page (at the bottom of the page is ok), as not
all major engines support image maps either.
Submit only your home page and perhaps one other
major page and then let the engines crawl your site. Check if your
submission was successful and re-submit your home page every couple of
weeks. Search engines may have taken your submission but later dropped
it (eg. Excite), found the sute unavailable at the time of spidering, or
not indexed your site due to a technical error on its part. Resubmitting
and checking on your submission every two weeks ensures that you eventually
get in and stay on the index.
Try to get as many people linking to your site as
possible. Related sites may be willing to link to your site. Search engines
are tending to rank sites due to link popularity and traffic.
The result is that more links to your webpage improves the ranking on the
search engines. Naturally, links also get you a lot of traffic. With Excite,
HotBot, and Lycos, link popularity determines whether the engine will crawl
deep a site and index more pages or not. Infoseek link popularity system
that places emphasis
on linking site status and relevancy. Keywords in the domain names
(and subdomain) is favored by Altavista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos and Webcrawlers.
Make sure that you submit manually to Excite, Lycos,
AltaVista, Infoseek, Northern Light, and HotBot or the major engines. Do
not leave the submission process to automated programs and services, as
the major search engines are too important and the automated services sometimes
make mistakes.
METATAGS:
TITLE tag text should be at most 200 characters
long and the first 80 characters are the most important, as most engines
focus on these in ranking and results display. Do not simply repeat keywords
in the title tag. Make some grammatical sense out of the title sentences
and ensure that the keywords feature first.
Search engines can eliminate pages they feel
are not worth indexing. Most search engines now advise that you only submit
your home page to them and let the engine crawl through your site and index
the pages it finds. If you decide to submit a whole many pages through
the online submission forms, you may be tagged a "spamdexer" (index spammer).
There is also an indication that engines like AltaVista give a higher ranking
to crawled pages than submitted pages. The following innovations
make an engine tag a particular page as spam and therefore not index it.
Do not do the following:
1. Keyword stuffing: This is the repeated use of
a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines can determine
whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest
of the words in the document.
2. Invisible text: Keywords at the bottom of a page
with the text color the same as that of the page background are detectable
by the engines.
3. Tiny text: Small text at the bottom of a page
is detectable by the engines.
4. Page redirects: Some engines (eg. Infoseek),
down rate pages that send the user to another site or page without his
or her intervention (e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript,
or server side techniques). If you use redirection, it should have a delay
of about 7 seconds.
5. META tags stuffing: Do not repeat your
keywords in the META tags more than 1 to 3 times, and do not use keywords
that are unrelated to the content of your site.
6. Do not submit the same page more than once on
the same day to the same search engine.
7. Do not submit virtually identical pages (slight
changes and different names).
METATAGS & frames:
Frames are notorious causing problems, such as confusing
search engines into cataloguing frame-dependent pages as stand-alone text
or worse, bypassing your site altogether.Web designers have avoided using
frames because older browsers couldn't support them. People in the design
world may still avoid frames for a variety of very legitimate technical
reasons. Probably the biggest problem with frames is that the information
contained within them can't be bookmarked. Frames are useful when creating
an omnipresent toolbar for content heavy pages like online manuals or sites
with complex navigation needs.
If you are going to us eframes, make sure you minimize the technical
complications resulting if a search-engine searches your site. One of the
main problems with frames is that web spiders won't or can't catalogue
the content from embedded pages, so you will need to make the master frameset
page as informative as possible. The <META> tag belongs within the <HEAD>
tag and is read only by certain search engine spiders. The tag allows you
to pass along your author name, a brief site description and various keywords,allowing
you to convey information about your site to the spiders that ignore framed
pages.
Another tag, designed specifically to address frame
handicapped browsers is <NOFRAMES>. Use this tag to provide more detailed
information than will fit inside a <META> tag. The way to use the <NOFRAMES>
tag is by putting it after the closing </FRAMESET> tag and then writing
in whatever information you would want seen on a frame-free home page.
You can nest everything from <BODY> tags to <P> tags inside the <NOFRAMES>
tags, essentially creating a whole second web page. Only very old browsers
and search engines (and people Viewing your Source code) will see this
text so there's no need to get too fancy.Not only will information inside
the <NOFRAMES> tag give search engines something to archive but any
links included will be followed which gives you the ability to have subsequent
pages catalogued. Since <NOFRAMES> is a paired tag, don't forget to
wrap it all up with a final </NOFRAMES>.
A few search engines catalogue every page, disregarding
their frame positioning. With this, sites using the frame-dependent navigation
toolbar will have stand alone pages archived which won't lead anywhere.Users
might arrive at a single page directly from a search result but they won't
have any obvious way of getting from that page to the rest of your site
because the overall navigation is dependent on loading frameset that the
isolated link bypasses. The best way to prevent users from getting stuck
on such a virtual desert island is to always include a link to your home
page. Of course since we're still talking about frames it's not as straightforward
as it seems. The trick is to ensure that such a link includes the target="_top"
string within the hyperlink reference. For example, in the A HREF instruction
such as =home.html target="_top">HOME</a>. This target attribute tells
the browser to load the new page over the single orphaned page. It's essential
that you include this target attribute. Any link clicked within a frame
that doesn't include a target attribute will load within the frame
windows. What this means is that although a plain vanilla Home-style tag
works well for a user who's arrived at your site without having the proper
frame layout loaded, anyone who's entered through the framed front door
and clicks a Home link without a target="_top" attribute will end up loading
your framed homepage within the frame.
To learn more about the META tag and
other ways of improving your search engine visibility, go to Web Site Promotion Workshop - Metatag Guide
They give a list is basic
metatags. The list describes the tag usage on a website. For more on web technology see the HTML page
.
I hope this data was useful.
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