When someone queries a major search engine using a keyword related to your site's products or services, does your page appear in the top 10 matches or is it your competition? If you're listed, but not within the first 10 to 30 matches, you lose, no matter how many engines you submitted your site to. Ranking near the top on the major search engines is the real key to bringing free, targeted traffic to your Web site.

Basic guidelines:

• Be product / service centered: Make sure you optimize at least one or more of your pages for EVERY product or service you offer.

• Don't spam: Don't blatantly "spam" search engines. Specifically, you should not put in keywords that don't pertain to your site just so you might attract more visitors. You could put in words such as "sex" or "stock market" or whatever. However:
  • You'll not be attracting the visitors that you want anyway.
  • You'll only serve to annoy people and label yourself as a "spammer".
  • Many search engines are looking for various kinds of index spamming and are banning sites entirely that they catch! If your site or pages disappear, consider this as a possible reason why.

• Watch keyword repetition: Be careful not to repeat a single keyword more than about six times, since some engines are now penalizing for "excessive" use of keywords. However, don't take this warning to the extreme since you DO want to repeat your primary keywords as many times as feasible since this effects relevancy rankings greatly.

1. TITLE: Include and repeat keywords that people might search for to find you in the TITLE of all your pages. This is very important. Keep common word groups or phrases that people might search on together if you can. The TITLE is EXTREMELY important to achieving good rankings.

2. PROMINENCE: Keywords that are more prominent will be weighted much higher with the search engines. Most engines rank you higher if the keyword or phrase is near the beginning of the title and as close to the beginning of the page as possible.

3. LENGTH OF PAGE: Keep your pages short while including and repeating keywords frequently, particularly in the first 3-5 lines of the pages. Some engines ignore or largely ignore wording beyond the first paragraph or two. Having a short page goes much farther to improve your rankings with many engines than you might think, even if the keywords are not repeated very many times.

4. "DOORWAY" PAGES: Unfortunately, what is appealing to the search engines is not always the best way to display the content for your Web site. Therefore, strongly consider creating a secondary "doorway" page for each product or service you offer designed for the search engines. Describe the product/service clearly but make sure you make generous use of keywords in your sentences. At the bottom of this short paragraph, put a link to your primary page such as "For more information on XYZ click here".

   The reason this works, and generally works better than most methods, is that engines often take the keywords being searched and divide it by the total number of words in the page or in the first portion of the page. Therefore, you may only have the keyword on the page a couple of times, but if there's not a lot of other words, those keywords appear to be much more "significant" to the page's overall content.

   You don't have to have links to these secondary pages from your home page. They simply act as a "doorway" to the appropriate page on your Web site. As a result, other visitors do not see them. If you don't link to them though from your home page or a close secondary page, you'll need to submit each of these pages manually for the search engines to find and index them. Be sure to review the warnings in Submitting Your Pages before doing this though.

5. REPEATING KEYWORDS: Experiment with repeating keywords up to six times and more on some engines. If this makes your page look bad, consider putting the keywords at the top of the page preferably in the same color as the background. That way nobody can see them but they should still get indexed. Warning: Some engines are now detecting wording in the same color as the background and either ignoring such text or leaving the page out of the index altogether! We'll try to update you on these kind of specifics in our MarketPosition Newsletter. Proper "netique" discourages blatant "spamming" of keywords. You should not try to go overboard repeating the same keyword or using keywords that don't apply to your site.

6. META TAGS: You should fill out META tags for keywords and description. You can find the syntax for this in most good HTML editors. Many editors such as Netscape Gold let you simply fill in the values under the Document Properties screen.

   META tags tell search engines what keywords or categories you would like to be listed under. A couple of engines factor this in to their indexing algorithm. However, generally it will not make a significant difference in how you are positioned. It doesn't hurt to try though especially since any of the engines can change the rules tomorrow and it could catapult you to the top of the list (assuming you took the time to add the META tags).

7. OBSERVE: Use the Detail Report to see which pages appear above yours in a search. Establish an Internet connection and then jump to those sites. Use your browser to view the HTML source code for the page. Try to determine why that page ranked better than yours for that particular engine and keyword search. Most likely it emphasizes one or more of the techniques described here. Once you recognize the technique, try to duplicate and improve upon that concept to achieve a better ranking, or at least a roughly equivalent ranking.

8. EXPERIMENT: Try different page designs and submit them. Use the Reporter to quickly check your rankings. What works for one engine may not work so well with another. However, you can use the Reporter's Trend Report and history archives to see if changes helped or hurt your rankings for each engine. Consider making different "doorway" pages tailored for each engine when necessary. Avoid submitting too many similar pages to the same engine (particularly on the same day) or you risk your site being banned or the submission rejected.

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Supports the top 10 to 12 major engines that generate over 90% of the search engine traffic. The KEY to gaining traffic to your site is not how many no-name engines you submit to, but achieving high rankings in the major engines. That's what WebPosition Gold's Page Generator and Page Critic will help you do. There is no other product on the market that rivals the Page Critic's customized, indepth, plain-English advice on what you need to change on YOUR page to achieve those coveted top 10 rankings!

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