At 01:40 AM 7/19/98 +0200, Ivan Sergio Borgonovo wrote:
>### IMPLORING PRAYER ###
>I would be very pleased if someone will give us a "lesson" on
>search engine strategies to rank sites.
>### -------------------------------- ###
The problem is that "strategies" implies a process that can be followed on
every site, and that from one week to another you can use the same strategy
on that same site. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way these days.
Search Engines are trying desperately to combat the spammers, and the folks
who host those "top 10 or money back" entry pages. As a result, Search
Engines are changing how they work on a regular basis to combat the folks
out there who will try every trick in the book for higher rankings
(including having a competitor's entire page as a giant comment tag within
one of their pages -- happened to one of my clients so I know this is true).
I call search engine site promotion "a gentle art" -- in fact, I have an
article by that name at <http://www.hartcons.com/onlinepromotion.html>.
In other words, instead of having a strategy, I have a couple of theories,
a lot of different "tricks", and some tried and true methods and I apply
them one at a time, over and over, trading one for another, until something
starts to work. I use tricks I learned from Danny Sullivan at
www.searchenginewatch, from the Planet Ocean people, from the Search Engine
Secrets book, from the book that came with my purchase of WebPosition, etc.
etc. (Links to most of these can be found at
<http://www.hartcons.com/resources.html#pr>.)
But most of all I use my instincts, and my sense of fair play. I don't
spam, I make sure every page has legitimate and *useful* content, I work my
title tags until they bleed (check out http://www.websonic.com/ for an
example), and I put comments in if I don't feel that it'll penalize me. You
can look at the source for http://www.hartcons.com/ and see all the
comments and strange Meta tags I'm trying out this month...they're
different from last month because last month's tags didn't do much.
Does it help? Marginally. I've spent a lot of time tweaking things for Rex
Hill, my father-in-law's winery (http://www.rexhill.com/) with some
success. But in the last two months their rankings in the search engines
have nosedived. Not because of anything I did, or anything another winery
site did, but because InfoSeek added their new ESP search protocol,
AltaVista did something weird to their ranking system, and a bunch of the
other SEs changed things as well. So, one of my chores for this weekend is
to tweak some titles on the Rex Hill site and to bug the winemaker for new
text for the home page so I can resubmit it.
(Aside: ya'll might enjoy the article on Rex Hill's new Vino El Nino wine
at http://www.rexhill.com/pr1.htm -- the wine label was designed by the
winemaker's six-year-old son.)
I'm sure this isn't quite what you're looking for, Ivan, but I hope it's
helped a little.
--Tamra Heathershaw-Hart
(happy to finally be using that degree in PR/Advertising from the
University of Oregon)
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