(I am still recovering from a bit of internet vandalism, so my replies
are somewhat delayed.)
> Try checking his competitors' sites for the keywords they
> use to start. Also, since his site is 'graphics-intensive',
> be sure to include large paragraphs of pertinent text in the
While looking at your competitors meta tags can be a start, you need
to know what words people are actually using to find things like those you
are dealing with. In the real world, the first three rules of retail
trade are "Location, Location, and Location". In the cyber-world, your
street address_es_, plural, are the keywords you use in your meta tags.
If all the traffic is going elsewhere, you will have few customers enter
your door, even if you are number one on the first page.
> 'ALT' tags of each graphic -- making use of as many of his
> keywords as possible. Be sure to include a 'description'
> META TAG using the keywords, as well. Some search engines
Your store front is your meta description tag, not a splash page.
Indeed, splash pages, being low on keyword usage, are not the entry point
of most visits to your internet shop. If you examine your web logs, you
will find that most people come directly to the relevant pages, (or the
pages that use relevant keywords,) and don't stay for many pages. Most
depart after one or maybe two pages. If a person is going to visit two
pages, your splash page is more of a liability than an asset. You want to
make each page count.
> will also recognize a 'category' or 'categories' META TAG,
> but not all. At any rate, it won't hurt to include either
> or both. You may also want to use a program such as AddWeb
> (available at http://www.cyberspacehq.com/ -- no relation to
> me) and submit the site at least once per month. It takes
> time, but I've managed to get a site I work with to come up
> in the number 1 position on three and in the top 15 on two
> others out of the top eight engines that AddWeb ranks.
But on which keywords? If you are the number one page on the wrong
words, you are either not getting traffic, or getting non-buying traffic.
If you are selling auto tires, you don't want people who are looking for,
say, something hot and skinny. They are not in the mood! Yet that is
what so many people put on their pages. I even read, I think it was in
this forum, of an auto parts dealer that loaded up his site with so many
sex words, that he ended up selling the site to a porno dealer. He was
getting lots of traffic! But Zero sales. Visitors just were not in the
right mood...
How do you know which keywords count?
First, look through your web logs. You will see what terms people
use _IF_ your ISP includes the HTTP_REFERER value, the URL of the page
they came from. If that was a search engine, the search terms will be
after the question mark.
Next, visit my query term pages at http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/
When you have some idea of what terms you want, or even if you don't, you
can contact me and I can go through our database looking to see which
words would be more effective. We pick a potential keyword, see what
phrases it is used in, and how popular it is, then we look other words in
those phrases, as well as synonyms, to see which words are more popular in
the queries people use. After a while, we can see which words and phrases
are more important for building real traffic, and set you up with a $95
weekly report that lists the top 500 or top 1000 phrases and related
keywords. (This is based on about two million queries that we sample from
a number of search engines every week.)
The reason for a weekly report, is that the keywords change over
time. People do different things as the seasons change, as new products
are developed, as things hit the news, and as fashions change. You need to
keep in step with the times. Our reports are one way of doing it, and we
do let you change the terms as time goes by. We also have nightly
reports, but those are more oriented to those who write for the web on a
daily basis.
In the near future, we expect to have a phrase workshop available;
but the internet break-in has delayed that, and I am working on beefing up
he security of our computer network before we attract anyone other than
dealers. (If anyone wants to become a dealer... contact me.)
One of our dealers gave the example of a client of their's who is
selling cell phones. He did not know that a lot of people were looking for
"cellphone battery", or that cellphone as a single word was far more
popular than cell phone or cellular phone. When he put the right terms on
one page on his site, that page went from a low hit count to a high hit
count, and sales of batteries took off.
You need to work the terms in, not just in the meta tags, but in the
description, title, header lines, and the text itself, as different
engines rank these in different ways. Some ignore the meta tags, others
look only at meta tags, the first 700 to 1000 or so characters. Then too,
you need to put the more important phrases in your header lines near the
top so that people can see how relevant the page is to what they are
looking for. After all, if you are on a popular street, the competition is
just two clicks away from your page.
Visit http://www.mall-net.com/se_report/ for some keyword ideas, and
http://www.mall-net.com/se_tech/zero.html for ideas on how to get on
popular search engine pages with less competition.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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