Getting Higher Ranks BEFORE you submit
Before you Submit to those search engines do the extra work that will guarantee you Higher search ranks.
Now you've got a decent webpage, with good content and meta tags. You're ready to submit to the search engines. Or are you? What you've done so far are the basics. There's a lot more you can do, time and money permitting, to improve your odds of ranking highly. Here are some tips on what to do (and not to do), to get "extra credit" from the search engines. Get your own domain name This is the best investment you'll ever make. A domain name costs $10-30 a year, it's dirt cheap. There are three big reasons for getting your own domain name:
- Some search engines won't list you unless you do.
- People are more likely to buy if you have your own domain name. What looks better to you, "http://www.fredjones.com/" or "http://members.aol.com/fredjones123/"?
- You can change your webhosting service without messing up all of your search engine listings. I get emails every week from people saying "I'm moving from aol to msn, what will happen to my rankings?" If they had their own domain name, nothing, it's not a problem.
I personally use Stargate.com they are low cost very fast and we know the layout of the members area so we can talk you through a hosting setup on the phone.
This is an absolute no-brainer. Get your own domain name! Don't get hyped about long domain names I've been getting a lot of questions about the new, longer domain names that are available. There is a lot of misinformation being passed around about them. The big lie is that if you have a domain name with lots of keywords in it (eg: add-url-register-website-promote-site-selfpromotion.com) you will get a higher ranking in the search engines. This is flat out not true. NONE of the major search engines will significantly boost your rankings based on keywords in your url. Not one. This is what they said when Danny Sullivan, editor of the highly recommended Search Engine Watch Newsletter asked them, and I've confirmed it by experiment. If the search engines look at them at all, they simply add the url text to the rest of the page, so the added benefit of keywords in the URL is totally insignificant. Don't waste your money. If you insist on trying the keywords in URL, do it either using subdirectories or subdomains. You'll still be wasting your time, but at least you won't be wasting money!
Avoid Search Engine Tricks
Some "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keyphrases in comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so on. I strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them. My philosophy is that you should try and help the search engines by making it as easy as possible to get a good idea of what your page is about. That way, as search engines get better and better at rating the contents of sites, your rankings will get better over time, with no effort from you. I know this is sort of repeating what I just said a couple of screens higher on this page, but it bears repeating. If you try and fool the search engines, in the long run, you'll be the fool.
Got Links?
Once you have your pages up and running, and chock full of useful content, it's a very good idea to try and get other people to link to them. It's not enough to just get them in the search engines. There are three very good reasons for doing this: First, many search engines are now using link popularity (how many other pages link to your page) as a ranking criteria -- they figure that if other sites link to your page, it might be useful. Second, it's recently been revealed that Inktomi applies a ranking penalty to any url submitted through their free "Add URL" system, but removes it if their spider also finds the page by following a link from another site (they do this in an attempt to find and penalize "doorway" pages). And third, you'll get traffic from the websites that link to you. Getting links isn't that hard. When you find a website that has content similar to yours, email the webmaster and ask for a link, pointing out why it would be appropriate. If he has content on his site useful to your visitors, link to him without even offering to trade links. Link to him, then email him and ask for a link back. A good site for learning the basics of getting links is Linking 101. Do not subscribe to Link Generators of any kind. You will be BLACK LISTED for this and never recover online for trying to "Cheat" your way to the top.The biggest search engine to use link popularity is Google (who came up with the idea), and the two sites that generate the most link "value" on Google are Yahoo and Open Directory. For many people, the true value of the $299 a year cost of a Yahoo listing isn't the clicks from Yahoo, but the boost in their rankings on Google. GunMuse.com can generate you these same results with a link off of our home page which we do through our Top of the page banner advertising. Yahoo's $300 is only that they will LOOK at your site it does not guarantee you will be in the directory. Its smarter to buy a $250 guaranteed ad package from us than it is to pay Yahoo for a maybe. Which for most gun sites is a NO.
Flash is a plague upon the net
Avoid using Flash in your website. Flash is a black box to the search engines, they can't see inside it. Anything presented by Flash is invisible to them. So that means it is invisible to people trying to find your product or service. Flash is almost never used appropriately on the net. One of the few examples of good flash use is HowStuffWorks, or Flashbunny.org where it is used to present little explanatory animations. But time and time again, I see entire sites created in Flash. What's the point? Since the search engines can't see the Flash content, the chances are, these sites won't rank well for the searches they want to rank well. Which means they won't get the free traffic. Which means almost nobody will see the high-tech super-cool way-keen website that they paid a huge amount of money to a "web design expert" to create. My advice is simple. Death to Flash. If a consultant recommends that you use Flash in a website, run for the door. If you can trample him or her on the way out, consider that a bonus. Just in case I'm not being clear, let me put it another way. Anyone who recommends extensive use of Flash in a website ought to be taken out and shot. Javascript suffers from similar problems. It clutters websites, and doesn't work on all browsers. Use it only for absolutely essential functional activities. Never use it to create flashy effects. A note about Framed sites Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your website can hurt their rankings. My experience is that this is not so, as long as you construct your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your in this excellent article. Once you've got your pages configured, simply promote them all (the frameset page and the subframe pages) to the search engines. The MultiSubmitter tool, which you get access to by forking over $10 or more, makes this easy!
Hiding your JavaScript and CSS
If you are using Javascript or CSS in your pages, you probably stuck it at the top of your pages. Whups! Remember that search engines tend to rate what they find at the top of pages a bit higher -- and what do you have there? Pages of Javascript! A better way to do things is put the Javascript (or CSS) in a separate file, and include it into your pages with a single tag.
Author: GunMuse Date: Wednesday Sep 22 2004 19:32:57 pm
