Get More Hits By Understanding Search Engines

Get More Hits By Understanding Search Engines

Knowing just the little bit above can give you ideas of how to give your page more exposure.

Hustle for Links

Most software agents find your site by links from other pages. Even if you have sent in your URL, your site can be indexed longer and ranked higher in search results if many links lead to your site. One of my sites that couldn't show up in the most casual search got most of its hits from links on other sites. Links can be crucial in achieving good exposure.

Use Titles Early In the Alphabet

All engines that I used displayed results with equal scores in alphabetical order.

Submit Your URL to Multi-Database Pages

It is best to use a multiple-database submission service such as SubmitIt! to save you the time of contacting each search service separately. Remember, it takes 6-8 weeks to become indexed.

Control Your Page's Summary

You can use the meta tag name="description" to stand out in search results. Appear in search summaries as "Experienced Web service, competitive prices" not "Hello and welcome. This page is about."

Search Reverse Engineering

Simulate your audience's search for your page (have all your friends list all the searches they might try), then see what you need to do to come up first on their search engine's results list.

1. Use the meta-tag name="keywords" to put an invisible keyword list at the beginning of your document that would match keywords your audience would use. Most search engines rate your page higher if keywords appear near the beginning.
2. How many times do the keywords appear in the text? It usually demonstrates good writing if you don't repeat the same words over and over. However, search engines penalize you for this, usually rating your page higher for repetitions of keywords, inane or not. Some authors combat this by putting yet more keywords at the bottom of their pages in invisible text. Look at the source code for this article, and you'll see what I mean; the words are just in the same color as the background.

SPAMMERS BEWARE

"Spamming" is net-lingo for spreading a lot of junk everywhere; keyword spamming is putting hidden keywords a huge number of times in your document just so yours will be rated higher by search engines.

1. Search engines typically limit you to 25 keywords or less, and one I know of truncates your list when they see an unreasonable number of repetitions.
   
2. Invisible text at the end of your pages puts blank space there, which looks bad and slows loading. Services which rate pages will enjoy marking you down for this. Responsible Keyword Use: If an important keyword doesn't appear at least four times in your document, I hereby give you the right to add invisible text until it appears a maximum of five times.