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ASAP's Gives You The "Bare Necessities" Needed for Search Engine Priority Ranking, Positioning, Creating Meta Tags, Spider Searches, Indexing, Html, and Web Promotion.

The robots are out looking for your pages so plan your web site well. Select your keywords carefully for the spider searches, indexing, positioning, and web promotion. These are some of the bare necessities for priority placement.

Select Your Keywords with Extreme Care.

Determine the two or three dozen keywords that seem to be the most important to your site, then ensure that the most important of these are in your Title, Meta tags, and are mentioned early on your web page.

Examine your competitors, or similar sites on the web. What keywords did they use? Where do they show up in a query using these keywords?

Try to use uncommon keywords. The more frequently words are found in web pages catalogued by most search engines, the more difficult it is to find any particular page containing those frequently - used words. You have to state these things that your pages are definitely about, but you have also to find keywords that set you apart from others.

Each page in your web site will have different keyword phrases that reflect the page's content. For example, if you have a page about the history of astronomy, then "astronomy history" might be your keyword phrase for that page. Your keyword phrase should always be at least two or more words long. Pair the generic keyword with something more specific. Pair them with one or two other words. There are so many other keyword combinations where you can achieve a higher ranking. Find a keyword combination that you can dominate a search engine with.

Do not repeat your keywords too many times, it can work against you. Most of the search engines will penalize you for this.

Select Your Title and Description Carefully

The title of a document is specified by the title element, which should be placed in the document Head. Each document can have only one title, which should identify the document content in a general way. The title element must occur within the head of the document, and may not contain anchors, paragraph tags, or highlighting. The length of titles is unlimited, however, long titles may be truncated in some applications. To minimize this possibility, keep titles to fewer than 64 characters.

Creating Meta Tags

Using keywords within hidden <META> fields

Some search engine robots allow you to specify keywords, descriptions, and other information within hidden fields on your pages. When hidden fields are available, the robots use information from them rather than from the text that shows. Use the [META] tag within the [HEAD] element to do this. The basic syntax is:

<META name="description" content="Write your description here">

Do not use any HTML tags within the "description" or "content" part of the META tag.

Suppose the HTML at the top of your web page looked like:

<HEAD> <TITLE>The Kids In The Hall Home Page</TITLE> <META name="description" content="Home page for The Kids In The Hall, Canada's funniest comedy group."> </HEAD>

the following title and description would appear when your page is listed on a page of search results:

The Kids In The Hall Home Page Home page for The Kids In The Hall, Canada's funniest comedy group.

Specifying keyword phrases: You can use a second [META] tag to specify keyword phrases that further describe your web page. The basic syntax is:

<META name="keywords" content="Write your keywords here, in a comma separated list">

For example:

<HEAD> <TITLE> Landing Venture Capital </TITLE> <META name="description" content=" Tips on obtaining venture capital for your hi-tech start-up. "> <META name="keywords" content=" asset based lending, capital, enterprise funding, equity funding, expansion capital, funds for growth, growth financing, underwriting, venture investment "> </HEAD>

Using <META> Tags to specify type, source and use

Some search engines utilize advanced forms of artificial intelligence to focus searches on specific types, sources and uses of the information provided in web pages. Specifiying Meta tags helps the robots find you.

Length of description and keywords Your description can include up to 200 characters of text. The keywords can include up to 1000 characters of text. Do not repeat the same keyword more than 7 times in the Meta Tag. If you do this, the search engine may ignore the entire list of keywords.

Sites using Netscape or Microsoft frames In your main HTML file (the file containing the [FRAMESET] tags), you should include a description of your site using Meta Tags. Make sure that your description and keywords adequately summarize the contents of the frames on your page.

Sites using JavaScript If JavaScript functions make up the first 200 characters on your page, you should use Meta Tags to provide a description for your page.

Sites using images Some sites also store the ALT attribute in the <IMG> tag. If your site mainly consists of graphics, you can also use the ALT attribute to describe your page.

Designing Page Content for Search Engines

Search engines typically weight content at the beginning of a page especially heavily, so make sure that the very first heading and paragraph of the page summarizes the page (just like the headline and first paragraph of a news story should tell the reader what the story is about) and quickly answers any "who, what, where, when and why" questions a viewer might have.

Use Header tags to indicate major subject matter on your web pages. Normally the first header (H1) will be the same as the title. Search engines often consider header text particularly important; they can easily tell that a particular piece of text is a header if you mark it up as such by enclosing it in an <Hn> element; they have a much harder time discovering this if you merely enclose it in <FONT> elements. Put important information near the top of your page in the first paragraph and not at the bottom.

The Descriptive Paragraph at the Top of Your Page

This paragraph should be used in the HTML Head and in your introductory paragraph. It is what search engines will usually display to the user if your page is among the results of the query. It is what people that manually index the web will usually use for an annotation.

The first few sentences of that page must be impressive. You may achieve a top 10 ranking, but if the 2 or 3 line description that the search engine extracts from the top of your page or your Mta Tag sounds dull or uninviting, potential visitors will scroll right past you and choose a page that looks more interesting.

The summary description that is generally extracted from your Meta Description tag or from the first part of your page is crucial to your position's effectiveness. If a page lacks descriptive text, then there is little chance this page will come in high in results of a query of a search engine. It is not enough for this text to be in the graphics. It has to be html text. Some search engines will catalogue Alt text and text in the comment and Meta Tags.

Catalogues of search engines contain the text read from the pages they have visited. If you want your web page to be found using some key words, be sure to include these words near the beginning of the web page.

Improving Relevancy

The earch engine makes determination about relevant words based on how words are used on the page. A short, one paragraph page will often rank higher than a long wordy page even though the longer page may include the phrase more times. That's because many search engines divide the number of keywords by the number of total words on the page to score the page for "relevancy." Therefore, it's often the concentration of that phrase/keyword that matters more than the frequency.

Search engines will then take this score and add additional weight to keywords found in the Title Tag, Heading Tags, and the first 200 or so words of the page. All words are generally indexed, but those near the top will carry the most "weight". Try both a long and short page and see how you do, since sometimes a longer page may do better.

Use the keyword early; with most engines, having your best keyword at the beginning of your Title tag will raise your rank considerably over simply putting the keyword in the middle or the end of the Title. The same rule applies to the location of the keyword in the content of the page. The sooner in the page it appears, the better. This is called the "prominence" score for the keyword.

Don't try to say everything on this one page or you'll dilute your effectiveness for the page in relation to the search engines. Keep the copy exciting and upbeat so they'll feel compelled to click on your next link. This is crucial - you'll get traffic to that page, but you'll not get many who proceed on to the rest of the site.

The search engines are indexing literally millions of web pages. with topics ranging from A to Z. When developing your keywords it is useful to try to put yourself into the mindset of your intended audience. You need to remember that your web site promotional efforts do not stop with submitting to the search engines. Put your url on all of your business cards, advertisments, and just anything you have available to get the word out. You should also consider using press releases, newsgroups, and other online directories. I have a large list of these sites for free promotional sites

Alta Vista - References first 30 words on page for description unless you use Meta Tags. Alta Vista determines the priority of matches by indexing the words closest to the beginning of the front page.

Infoseek Indexes the first 200 characters of your site after the html <body> tag unless you use Meta Tags in the creation of your site. Your description can include up to 200 characters of text.

Lycos engine compares each page to your query and gives higher scores to pages that contain the words as you typed them into your Web Site. It also looks for pages that mention these words early on, rather than far down.

Yahoo searches for words in URL, title & description (25 words) you enter when submitting your url.

Webcrawler - Webcrawler computes its confidence rating by considering how many times the terms in your search occur in that document. The more frequent, the more relevant.

Savvy Search

SavvySearch is an experimental search system designed to query multiple internet search engines simultaneously. Use the Search Form to enter your query, indicate whether you would like to search for all or any of the query terms, and indicate the number of results desired from each search engine. When you submit your query, a Search Plan is created wherein the nineteen search engines are ranked and divided into groups. Ranking factors include: The text of your query, sources and types of information selected, estimated Internet traffic, anticipated response time of remote search engines, and the load on our computer.

See Your Position On Major Search Engines Online

As a webmaster or website owner, you should be concerned about how your site "ranks" in the search engines: it is, after all, a measure of how easy it is for potential customers to find your website. It is also a dreary, monotonous task to research where you "rank" on a regular basis. Rank This is a free online tool to help you determine your "ranking" on different keyword sets in 8 of the major search engines. The spider tells you not only if your site is in the top 200 results for those keywords, but also lists the sites that are in the top 10 on that search. Just in case your site isn't in the top 200, they include a guide to improving your rankings and a discussion group to post questions and share advice.

Meta Tag Medic and Search Engine Help

The Search Engine Tutorial for Web Designers explains, how to design your pages, keeping the search engines in mind, and why it is necessary to do so. Knowledge is a powerful weapon and having knowledge of WHAT a search engine is going to do with your page, while you are designing it, allows you to build a better resulting web page.

Robotic Searches

This page allows you to find out how a site is ranked in a search engine, relative to key terms. You pick a search engine from a list and type in the keywords you want to search with. In another box, you enter a domain name to look for in the search results then that domain's placement on that key term will be returned. Only the first 200 entries from a search are returned.

Position Agent Chances are, the majority of your website traffic comes from the popular directories and search engines. Try the free version of Position Agent and view the search engine rankings for your website on 12 top search engines for selected keywords on the top 5 pages (and the top 20 pages of AltaVista and Yahoo).

Resize Anamated Gifs

This online utility will help you reduce the file size of your image files so that they load faster and take up less space in your homepage directory. You can try it out with the example image by clicking on "Start GIF Wizard". After you see what GIF Wizard can do, try entering the URL of your homepage.

Free E-Mail Accounts

Hot Mail is a large internet based email service that provides Free Internet based email. Advertising revenues are used to support the service. If you will be changing email accounts or ISP's your hotmail address will remain the same. This is something good to keep in mind, as many people change their email addresses from time to time.

Midi Files

Filecity is a midi file source with thousands of files online ready to download. With several worldwide mirror sites to download their archive from, you'll never have problems accessing the extensive midi collection. You can use their midi files for your website.

Glossay Of Terms

A list of commonly used Internet terms to help you get familiar with them. When compliing this list I learn a lot myself.

Browse Anonymous

Many people surf the web under the illusion that their actions are private and anonymous. Unfortunately, it isn't so. Every time you visit a site, you leave a calling card that reveals where you're coming from, what kind of computer you have, and other details. Most sites keep logs of all your visits. In many cases, this logging may constitute a violation of your privacy. The "anonymizer" service allows you to surf the web without revealing any personal information. It is fast and it is easy.

How Big Is The Internet

The Domain Survey attempts to discover every host on the Internet by doing a complete search of the Domain Name System.

Coder.com

Form email, free banner creation, and innovative products and services. Creative tools which make the web a more useful place. Support for the Internet community with Freeware.

123 Counters

123-Counters is a web counter service to monitor your web traffic. It provides you with an easy, 3rd-party source of verifying your page counts and identifying your visitors. To provide web surfers with an authentic system of monitoring traffic.

BiggByte Link Checker

The BiggByte Link Checker Verifies all the popular HTML link types. It includes visual frame support, internal browser view HTML source, and proxy support browsing capabilities. You can quickly verify a wide range of errors and verify files from a disk or Internet pages. There is also full ftp verification DNS lookup.

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