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A key issue for public Web sites is visibility. If your Web site can't
be found, you won't be visited, and an unvisited Web site is
pointless. So, how do you ensure that search engines find you?
Once you've registered with Lycos, Altavista, et al, you need to keep
doing so -- it can take weeks to appear in their indices and often it
takes multiple requests to get registered. You might use one of the
companies that do registrations for you -- typically for $19.95 a
month or thereabouts -- but finding a reputable outfit is difficult.
(If any of you have discovered such a company and would be willing to
recommend them, let me know and I'll list your recommendations in SOS.)
But even when you get registered, you also need to be indexable. This is
done by the search engines' spiders (the software that crawls URLs and
indexes content) looking not only at page contents but at META tag
declarations as well.
META tags are tags in the head section of a Web page that exist to
define various document attributes. In the case of being indexed, the
relevant META tags look like:
<Meta name="KEYWORDS" content="keyword1,keyword2,keyword3">
and,
<Meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="text">
So, I might have for my site:
<Meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Swift Systems, Web Hosting, Technical Services, Internet,
Dedicated Access, Web Applications, Real Audio and Video Services">
<Meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="World Class Internet Services">
Now it turns out that most of the search engines won't rank long lists
of keywords too highly and keywords repeated too often may not get
ranked highly either -- in other words, over using keywords won't make
you more visible.
I was recently given a suggestion to get around this: Copy your home
page several times and edit the keyword list to focus on a single
different concept on each copy. Then link the copies to the real home
page perhaps through disguised links that a spider can find but which
people will ignore. This makes the pages more focused and easier to
find so the search engines should give your pages a higher weighting.
Swift Systems has created a tool to help you create Meta Tags for your web pages. Click Here to use it.
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