Promote: Search Engine Submission Tips, Tricks, & Secrets
Knowing the search engines tips, tricks, and secrets will help you better prepare your web pages to be indexed by the search engines. This list contains just a few items that will help prepare you to do the best possible job to promote your pages through search engines. At the bottom of the page are links to sites with more comprehensive lists of tips.
Make Good Use of Your Document Title
The document title is crucial for effective placement on almost all search engines. Inclusion of a short description or list of key words within the title is probably not inappropriate. However, it is probably sensible to limit your title to 64 characters, which is the HTML specification maximum.
Do NOT abuse META tags:
The over-enthusiastic use of META tags is not only frowned upon, it is self-defeating. The window of opportunity for this little prank of large META tags is closing. Most of the major search engines have refined their search capabilities to ignore excessively long META tags and some are now penalizing sites that use them. Some search engines are also beginning to punish those who excessively repeat keywords by refusing to list them. Lycos and InfoSeek both enforce this policy, so be careful about taking this practice.
Descriptions of around 50 words and 25 keywords are unlikely to fall foul with most engine criteria. You may well get away with more than this, but don't count on it. The best thing to do is keep these within 250 characters. Given these limitations, the repetition of keywords is unlikely to be an efficient use of the the keywords META tag.
Keep Your Home Page Short and to the Point
For search engines that ignore META tags, such as Excite, the use of relevant text is essential. Many searches will return results based on word frequency within a document. A home page that repeats the page title once and includes a short description with essential key words is going to work better than a page with a lot of text in it.
Pay attention to the title, META tags, and relevance of the text on all of the pages on your site. Title and keyword differences between pages improve the chances that your site will match any given search criteria. This is a powerful technique, that, if used too enthusiastically, can degrade the usefulness of search engines.
Search Engine Secrets
Make more than one copy of your page. These copies (known as doorway or gateway pages) can have the exact same content, it can have different keywords or even be the same content but listed differently.
Putting punctuation, especially exclamation marks, in front of your name will make your company list even higher.
Making your company name begin with A so that you will be listed higher.
Changing your title regularly will often result in robots thinking that a new site exists. As a result, your site may be listed more than once in an index.
Don't use single words or prepositions for keywords. It does not help searches of your pages.
Links to Other Tip Resources
