Interestingly, the following article from InternetDay appeared in my mailbox
this morning the same time as these questions about search engine rankings.
***********************************
Maximizing Traffic From Search Engines
It has become rather obvious in recent months that many Web sites lack
sufficient traffic, both in quantity and quality (i.e., market targeting)
of visitors. Essentially, there are basically only four ways a potential
customer can reach your commercial home page.
One is through traditional off-line advertising, such as someone seeing
your URL displayed in a newspaper advertisement.
Moving on to the world of on-line advertising, a visitor may travel to your
site because you sent him notification via direct, hopefully opt-in, e-mail.
Alternatively, he or she may follow a link to your site; Internet banner
advertising is probably the most common example of this.
Finally, the WWW surfer may type a phrase into the query field of a search
engine which brings up your URL, possibly resulting in a visit. This
article will briefly outline how to maximize traffic obtained from the last
category, with an emphasis on search engine positioning.
For example, suppose that you recently opened a store selling old, fairly
rare texts, and that you believe that a highly representative phrase
describing your business would be 'antiquarian books'. If a potential
customer inputted the phrase 'antiquarian books' into his or her favorite
search engine and the search engine subsequently outputted 500 URLs, there
would obviously be a tremendous advantage in favor of the business whose
URL is first on the list over the same type of enterprise whose URL is last.
Now the question arises: Is your site's position in the search engines
something over which you can exercise any control?
The answer is definitely yes, with the proviso that you remain fully aware
that you cannot control your rank with the pinpoint accuracy that certain
unscrupulous Internet entrepreneurs claim.
To improve your site's position in the search engines, you will need to
follow this six step procedure:
(1) Careful writing and/or re-writing of the page whose rank in the search
engines is to be optimized.
(2) Conscientious proofreading of the page and its HTML, especially with
regard to description meta tags and keyword meta tags.
(3) Submission of the approved page to all the major search engines and
directories, quite often followed by submission to somewhat more minor
seach engines.
(4) Confirming that your URL has been indexed by the major search engines.
(5) Establishing your site's rank with respect to specific keywords and
keyword phrases in the most important search engines.
(6) Finally, as I cautioned earlier, this process, while rational and fully
understandable, is not as much of an 'exact science' as some would lead you
to believe. Therefore, if you are dissatisfied with the results obtained
from step (5), but are confident that you can do better and can find the
time, you will need to go through this entire sequence again.
In my opinion of these six steps, probably step (1), the proper preparation
of the page, will require the most study and effort on your part.
Interestingly enough, step (1) may also be broken down into six components.
For a particular Web page, you will need to analyze the page's:
(1) Title Tag
(2) Description Meta Tag
(3) Keywords Meta Tag
(4) HTML Body Copy
(5) ALT Text
(6) Comments Tag
Remember that your single biggest complication will probably be the fact
that different search engines use different ranking algorithms. Despite the
importance of your home page's search engine position, this is not
something to rush into.
Before you make an expensive and/or time consuming mistake, you should
spend some time studying the specifics of the methodology I have outlined
above. Fortunately for you, there are a number of excellent and free
Internet resources available so that you may accomplish precisely that,
including I humbly submit, my own recently expanded Web site!
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article by Frank Feldmann, owner of Kaleidoscope DTS. Frank's award winning
Free Search Engines Secrets page
http://www.kaleidoscope-dts.com/secrets.html contains witty yet highly
practical advice on improving your Web site's position in the search
engines. Frank can be reached by email or by calling (516) 826-9085.
At 02:03 PM 9/2/98 -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Howdy All
>I used to be able to register pages with the top search engines for free,
>but lately have not been able to find those free services. Is it my
>imagination or are all those free services becoming less free these days?
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