Greetings Ed, Yes you can easily buy you way into various search engines as a sponsor or the like, but that alone does not guarantee ppl will view your site.
Most search engines will first look for the presence of that keyword on your Web page. If the keyword is present, your site will be included in the search results. If the keyword is near the top of the page, in a headline or title, in the meta-tags in the site's HTML and/or appears frequently on the page, your site will appear sorted higher in the search results. Think of every page on your site as a possible entry point. All of the pages on your site should be submitted to the search engines. However, don't do it all in one day. At best, when submitting pages to the search engines submit only 3-5 pages per day. And remember, Directories will generally only accept one page. If you submit multiple pages to them it will probably be considered spam. If you are on a very busy paid server - you may also have problems. In order not to overburden any particular server, most search engine spiders limit their access to each server. If your pages are hosted on a server with thousands of other pages, the spider may never get the time to reach (and index) you. The time from submission of a site until it shows up in the search engine database can range from days, to months, to never. Once you have submitted, check back frequently to determine if your site is listed. If your site is not listed, refer to the search engine Help Files and ascertain if it is time for you to submit again. There are six Major Engines - Google, Direct Hit,�Excite, Lycos, FAST - All The Web,�and Northern Light, you should try and get yourself listed with at least these seven. In addition to listing with the major search engines you'll also want to get listed with any international, regional or specialty search engines that fit your web site. Many people believe, mistakenly, that by bulk submitting they will automatically be listed in these valuable resources, but that is not necessarily the case. Most regional and specialty search engines are actually directories, and each of them are set up differently. Because of this, you have to actually visit the directory and find your most appropriate category manually. There is no easier answer. Many directories list web sites alphabetically (Yahoo). When submitting to a directory or designing your title, try to make the title start with the letter 'A' or some other letter low in the alphabet. If your site is low on graphic links and you would like to optimize for search engines which read ALT text, since use of 1x1 transparent pixel gifs has been overused, use a slightly larger transparent gif, remembering to use border="0", make a link out of it, and assign ALT text to the link. Use sparingly. Remember be careful not to over submit. Submit no more than 3-5 pages per site to a search engine on the same day. When submitting pages from several sites, it can be an extra precaution to clear cookies and/or reboot in between submissions if you're on a dial-up connection with dynamic IPs. Whenever possible, opt for hand submission over bulk submission programs. Many of the 'search engines' bulk submission programs that claim to submit your site to 900+ search engines are actually submitting to lists - not engines. When hand submitting to the smaller engines, set up an 'off-main' e-mail account to catch the spam which is likely to follow your submission. Try not to repeat a keyword in your Meta Tags more than three times. Go over five times and you may be asking for trouble. Also, omitting commas may help you form more phrases. Review the code of competitors who outrank you to see how they did it. One of the best ways to learn is to examine what works for others. Avoid Link Popularity Farms that promise to boost your link popularity the 'easy' way. Build your link popularity one site at a time, and if you need help check out the Zeus Robot. Having one of your keywords as your domain name will increase your ranking by a small margin with some engines. If you are using this approach to get the maximum boost from your keywords, separate them in your domain name with a hyphen (i.e. web-design.com is preferred over webdesign.com). Some engines such as AltaVista will give you a boost in the search results the longer a page has been in the index. If you have a page that has been in the index for a long time, don't remove it. If you'd like to add some extra keyword text links to your page but have no place to put them, create a Cascading Style Sheet that removes the underline and makes the colour of the link consistent in all states with the rest of the text on the page. Some engines do not read your meta tag description and instead use the first line of text on your site. That can make things very ugly sometimes from a design perspective. The answer? Some engines will read ALT text. To that end, you can use a small transparent gif and place it just beneath the <BODY> tag. Make that gif a link, and assign your description as an ALT tag. Some engines will treat this as the first line of text on your page.� Well just my two cents worth of information Nyx Wolfwalker Nyxstium - http://www.nyxstium.ca Macintosh Sisters - http://www.macintoshsisters.org AIMUG Canada - http://www.nyxstium.ca/aimugcanada -- Mac Webmasters is sponsored by <http://lowendmac.com/> and... Small Dog Electronics has Lasso, Filemaker, and FileMaker Server on Sale! High Technology for low prices. http://www.smalldog.com Support Low End Mac <http://lowendmac.com/lists/support.html> Mac Webmasters info: <http://lowendmac.com/lists/macweb.shtml> --> AOL users, remove "mailto:"; Send list messages to: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To unsubscribe, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For digest mode, email: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subscription questions: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> List archive: <http://www.mail-archive.com/mac.webmasters%40mail.maclaunch.com/> Using a Mac? Free email & more at Applelinks! http://www.applelinks.com
