Newsletter ArchiveSUBJECT: Building Traffic; Part 4 Welcome to the Internet 800 Directory Newsletter http://inter800.com. Last week I received several e-mails asking if there was a fee to add someone to this group. This newsletter is a service we providing to the companies that list with our directory, but is available to anyone that would like to receive it. They can add their e-mail address to the list at (http://www.inter800.com/news800/). Submitting a toll free number for a listing in the directory will also automatically enroll you on our mailing list. We are now starting the fourth week of "Building Traffic on Your Website". This week I going to cover some ways to help your ranking on returns by using your key words in your web site. Remember the object of a search engine is to find the most relevant pages for the person searching, quickly and easily. It is a very competitive business and the people that run the search engines are constantly changing their indexing systems to find the most relevant pages. If you discover a "trick" to beat their system and have your site return at the top of a return, they will figure out what you did and then they will treat your site as Spam, blocking or remove your site from their search engine. A "trick" that gets you a good return on one search engine can have you removed or blocked as Spam on another. Putting your key words on the top on the page in the same color as your background so only the search engine will see them, works on one search engine and gets you blocked on others. As a workaround for this problem, some people advocate creating an opening page for each search engine and changing them as the search engines change their indexing systems. This can work, but at what could be a huge cost. I going to give you some simple tips that will help get you returned, although these are not magic, nor guaranteed to work with every engine. Keyword Placement Make sure your keywords appear in key locations on your web pages. The page title is one of the most crucial. Failure to put strategic keywords in the page title can be the reason why perfectly relevant web pages may be poorly ranked. Let me give you an example. If you are have a Travel Agency located in Texas called Quality Travel, a good title might look like this: Changing your page titles and adding Meta tags is not necessarily going to help your page if the page has nothing to do with the key words. Your key words need to be reflected in the page's content. Use your keywords for your headline, if possible. Have them also appear in the first paragraphs of your web page. Reinforce your key words in a legitimate and natural manner in the text of your web page. Use this same philosophy when building the other pages in your site. Change the key words and title to reflect the service or product you are covering in these pages. Spider Capability Tips Some search engines are not able to read the page content inside of frames. If you use frames make sure you use the <noframes> tag and place your key words and links in this space. Any time you use graphics in your web page, make sure you add the ALT="" tag. Some of the search engines will index the words inside this tag. If you use an image map on your page, add text links some place on your page. Some of the spiders don't read image maps and will not index all your pages. If you are generating pages via CGI or database-delivery, some of the search engines won't be able to index them. Think about using static pages if you want them indexed. Some search engines will not index pages that use a Meta refresh tag that move visitors to another page in the site. Links Most search engines determine the popularity of a page by analyzing how many links there are to it from other pages. Some engines give pages with lots of links, or links from important web sites, a relevancy boost. Next week I want to cover how adding links can give your traffic a boost. All Contents Copyright ©1995-2001 The Internet 800 Directory Subscribe To The Newsletter: |