All You Need to Know About Search Engines

This article should tell you everything that you have ever wanted to know about search engines. The first thing that I am going to tell you, is that you have to understand that search engines are not a path paved in gold. They are merely one of the many tools used for internet marketing promotion. Although they only play a small part, you still want to make sure that the part that they do play, is a meaningful one. The best way to accomplish this, is by having excellent positioning within the search engine. Good position is not easy to come by and takes a lot of work on your part.

Before you even consider submitting your website, you should make sure that your site follows all of these guidelines:

• remove all "under construction" signs
• make sure the site is complete and offers interesting content
• give people a unique reason to visit your site
• make sure the first 25 words on the page are relevant to the subject
• make good use of title tags (business name and primary key words)
• keep the size of the title down to 40 characters or less
• remember that the title is the most important

Appearance of Your Listing

There are only two things that you must remember about what your listing will look like. Make sure to give some thought to these so your website will have a professional looking listing.

1) Your title tag should appear like this: <title>title here</title>

2) Your description tag should appear one of two ways:
a. <meta name="description" content="description here like this">
b. the first 250 words (or so) of visible text on your site

Spider Engines

A spider engine is an engine that goes to your site and indexes you based on what it finds. A few examples of spiders are: Infoseek, Excite, and AltaVista. (Notice that I didn't say Yahoo. Over at Yahoo they actually have a human, well many humans, that look at each page that has been submitted.) You will soon learn that every search engine is different. You need to learn the "algorithm" (set of rules) used by each engine to rank pages. These algorithms change constantly. You must keep up with them constantly in order to gain and maintain the best positioning possible.

Keyword Density

The only reliable way to learn a sites algorithm is to analyze actual results of a search on that engine. This must be done using a reliable keyword density analyzer. This tool will show you the weight of particular keywords in high ranking documents. You then simply reproduce this weight in your document to attempt to reproduce the results. Any advice you find that did not come from an actual analysis is probably smoke and mirrors. This method is very reliable. There are a few other factors that will affect rank that can not be measured this way (link popularity, spam filtering etc.), but keyword density is the easiest to measure and most reliable factor. There are a few sites that you can order a keyword density analyzer program.

A Little About Meta Tags

I know that you have heard of Meta Tags, even if you have no clue what they are. Meta Tags provide a useful way to control your summary of information. They can also help you provide keywords and descriptions for pages that may lack text. Some engines use them, some ignore them, but to be safe you should include them on all of your pages. There are two primary characteristics of Meta Tags, keywords and descriptions. You should not repeat keywords more than 6 times as some of the engines will penalize you for it. Also, the length of the Meta Tag should not exceed 1000 characters. There are a number of websites that can assist you in writing HTML Meta Tags. If you are concerned about taking the time to go through your website and insert all of the meta tags, there are plenty of software programs that can be downloaded for free that will do the work for you.

Final Reminders About Search Engine Submission

When you finally submit your site to a search engine, remember your listings won't show up overnight. You should allow 4 to 8 weeks for your pages to surface in the engines. With the millions of new webpages being put up daily it takes time to get them all indexed. By getting your pages ready for the search engines before submitting them, you'll obtain a much higher placement, and that's exactly what the game is all about! Also, create a lot of portal sites. A bunch of real, live sites that lead to your main site. The more that you have the more hits that you will get!