Search Engine Placement Tutorials

"Tutorial to Improve and Achieve Higher Search Engine Placement and Positions Pt. II"

Part II of the tutorial to improve search engine placements and positions discusses choosing keywords and Writing Meta tags. The links take you to in-depth discussion and articles on keywords meta tags and title relevancy to placement. These have been added to this the initial article.

Keywords In Title, Meta Tags and "alt" in the Image Tags

To compile the list I have a few resources and ideas to help you pick them. Get a few friends to compile a list of the queries they would use at a search engine if they were looking for the same topic. The best method is once you have your list go to the major search engines and input the keywords you have and inspect the highest ranked sites for those words and see what they did to get a good ranking. I came across a list that had the 200 most requested words at Yahoo! check 'em out it's a real eye opener!

Yes you read that right, some of the search engines do count the keywords in the "alt" attribute in the image tag so use some of your most important keywords there. Use as many of your best keywords in the <title></title> as possible without it becoming a list because some are checked manually. A lot of the directories don't use title or keywords. They depend heavily on your caption and description so when you know your going to be going to some of these have a couple of text files with a well written caption and description using as many of your keywords as possible but be careful a list is quite often rejected especially at Yahoo!

Speaking of Yahoo! here are a couple of tips I ran across that may be very helpful. When making your submission don't do it from the submit page go to the exact category you want and click the add url. For some reason this speeds up the process. The information on the submit page says you can use up to 20 words. Don't believe it! If you want a good description and caption keep it down to about ten. They have a habit of cutting these short resulting in poor or nondescript listings. Use as many of your keywords as possible without it sounding like a list. This is a directory and quite often these are Alphabet sensitive meaning listings starting with "A" will get the best ranking however just sticking an A at the the beginning won't help the submissions here they are checked by humans.

Remember you only get 1024 characters in your meta tag so don't waste any by using words that are net related. The reason? Most of the engines disregard these because they are too prevalent resulting in millions of matches on those words. Also if you read the article on search engines last month you'll recall I mentioned that some of the engines employ a type of fuzzy logic so if you use dog on a poodle page it will match dog with poodle so why list both. The engines aren't case sensitive so use all capital letters because if someone uses CAPITALS it is sensitive to this but they aren't sensitive to a query in lower case. They still match the lower case with the upper case. Increase your chances for matches by using all upper case. Another consideration is to make all your words plurals because they are matched even if the users' query was for the singular. Once again this enables you to use more words. To finish this discussion let me say that these are all pretty general tips so if you are trying to improve your ranking in a specific search engine and nothing works check the top rated document and make sure that one of these techniques is not penalizing you.

Meta Tags

There are only two meta tags of any consequence where search engines are concerned and they were demonstrated in the document segment of the page. I have only brought them up again to inform you that if you are not sure of the syntax or whatever you can go to the page and they have a cgi script that will walk you through the procedure of constructing these tags. Some of the robots have a problem indexing pages containing a meta refresh so avoid these on a page you want indexed. Placement or ranking for a site or page is important so be sure and go to the reference page and check out the resources there. Pay special attention to the listings at the Webmasters Guide to Search engines as it is the best of the sites that I went to in researching this article. I also have a table of information on specific engines and there quirks and how I rate their importance on the promotion side of things.

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