Search Engines - Some Tips & Tricks

Careful!: Don't 'spam' the engines. It is easy to do so even without realising.

 Register with relevant search engines - this is best done manually. Automated software submission should be avoided, or used with great care. Although search engines should spider most commercial sites eventually, this is often a very indeterminate process, so formal notification is necessary. Many engines are charging a fee for accelerated entry of new sites (e.g. Yahoo!), and Looksmart is the first to withdraw free submissions and insist on minimum payment of $199 for every new commercial registration.

 Keyword Placement - keywords or phrases that users are expected to enter into search engines when seeking the products/services on offer by the target web site, must be appropriately seeded in the relevant pages of the site. Choice of keywords is critical. Optimisation is a delicate process that places keywords in the right locations (e.g. Titles, Headers, body copy, URLs, anchor text, etc.) with the right frequency (e.g. not more than 7 times per page), and density (relative to the total volume of words on a page).

 Meta Tags - Not all search engines recognise meta tags, but some of the most important do. Less than 50% of commercial organisations use meta tags correctly, so a business that does implement these tags properly will benefit. Title tags and Keyword meta tags may be used to assist in the ranking process by some engines, but they must relate to the page contents. The Description meta tag plays no part in ranking (therefore does not require keyword 'stuffing') but is often used in search results lists, so should be made as explicit and appealing as possible.

 Link Popularity - used by many engines, notably Google, as an important criterion for relevance and authoritativeness. Sites with very few external links pointing to them may find it very difficult to achieve a high ranking. Sites should therefore maximise links to them by swapping links with non-competitive, ideally complementary businesses, or join link exchange schemes. Having one page with masses of external links though can result in a loss of rank as some engines may perceive this as a blatant cross-linking strategy.

 Doorway Pages - optimised for search engines (to obtain good positions for specific keywords with a given ranking algorithm) and intended to act as a gateway between search engine and target web page. Searchers might thus click on a link to a doorway page from a list of search results, then follow a link from the doorway to the final destination. Forwarding visitors to a doorway page to the main web site can be automated with the meta-refresh tag, but this is now viewed by some engines as 'spoofing' and is therefore discounted.

 New Material - web sites that are not updated for long periods of time are considered 'stale' and therefore less important. Ensure you make frequent changes that are noticeable to the engines.

 Site Construction - avoid frames, and more than two or three levels of directory hierarchy, as some search engines just won't follow all the links. Avoid having a sub-domain of someone else's domain (especially popular ISPs), and avoid dynamically generated pages if possible.