Search Engine Placement Secrets

"Tutorials to Improve Search Engine Placement or Positions"

Links to Specific Search Engine Tutorials

Search Engine Secrets? Search Engine Position Secrets? What Secrets! The first two questions are actually titles of reports Webmaster T has seen while investigating the validity of the reports being flogged on the net. The last question is his, namely, What Secrets? All, or at least 95% of what he saw was offered for free at the sites he used for his earlier research on Search Engine Placement. The effectiveness of this information is picking the right search engines to register on so here they are in order of importance Yahoo, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, AltaVista, WebCrawler and Hotbot. A high search engine placement on these search engines is one of the best ways to significantly increase traffic to a web site.

To refine the original method T spent over 100 hrs. at the engines querying them several different ways for the same words or variations of them to see what the results were. This enabled him to ascertain the reasons why the original method only seemed to work well on two. Unfortunately WebPosition Agent wasn't available when most of this was done.

On AltaVista and InfoSeek (***NOTE*** there have been some changes to these engines and an update will be added to the newsletter, as usual) the method seemed to work very well! At one time we had four pages from the search index positioned in the top ten at InfoSeek for a query but they dropped like a stone for others. Some times it was just a slight variable in the query that caused this.

After looking at pages that ranked above us T realized a correlation between meta tags, titles, and the first two hundred words of text, in some cases, including the alt=" " in images. At some of the search engines keyword usage in the first 200 words of text on the page is very important. Especially the first twenty or thirty. The importance decreases as you progress through the text.

In all cases, except Excite, and to a lesser degree Hotbot, he found the title being repeated as the first words of the text seen on the page improved search engine ratings the most. Let's use this page as an example. First of all, start by going to the view source in the browser and open it up. Note the title, meta tag keywords construction, meta tag description for the document, and the alt=" " in the banner.

Did you notice, the similarities to the title in the metas (both keywords and description), and the alt in the banner? The way the keyword meta tag broke up the title? How the words were changed for plurals and case sensitivity? The groupings of the words? The spelling errors? The number of repeats of the words, is 7 times the key?

You following me so far? Now that you have got your nose out of my source look at the first heading. Once again it looks very familiar doesn't it? See how the second heading just carries on from the first and the way I started the first paragraph. If you follow me so far then you are well on your way to the Top of the Heap on all or most of the Search Engines!

Before I go on to the specific search engines and let you in on what the T Man found, he has asked that I mention a new page and clarify the problems with the first method. Webmaster T found a lot of spamdexers on the search engines while he was havin' a look see in their sources and wants to do something about it.

We have added a new page entitled Spamdexers Page of Shame. If they are causing you problems report them to us and we'll act as the squealers and report them to the search engines involved. It's going to be a great program because along with the page is a nice listserv where search engine placement will be discussed, new engines passed on so you can submit to them and of course rat on the Spammers you encounter!

Tips for Good Search Engine Ratings and Placement was the first article that T and I wrote on search engine placement. As mentioned earlier there were some flaws in the method which were picked up at a resource, since removed from the page, for several reasons mainly that it seems the gentleman who wrote the article didn't see fit to keep it updated even though he is promoting the use of comments stuffed with keywords.

Another reason he was removed was because he gets the honor of being the first nominee to the Spamdexers Page of Shame. The main reason we nominated him first is because he is passing on information that is so outdated that following his methods will penalize you, not help you! People I can't stress enough that if you can't see it on the page then it's SPAMDEXING and all the search engines are down on this big time. I read a post from an Excite employee on a list that said they actually have a spam sniffer looking for these tricks. Do yourself and all the other users of search engines a favor and don't bother trying.

Two other flaws in the first article and an update on case sensitivity must be discussed or made clear before we move on. AltaVista is case sensitive and is primarily why the care is taken in the meta construction to accommodate this as much as possible.

ALL search engines except InfoSeek are plural sensitive. It may not hurt your page much but could make a big difference if it seems to make more sense to the user to use a singular query. All But InfoSeek return different results for a query in singular as opposed to the same query in plural hence the change in my meta construction and how I now use keywords in the title.

Secondly, fuzzy logic or whatever you want to call it is not covering you for words like promote. If you have a keyword like promote you have to pay special attention to the use of its, shall we say, variables. Here's a demonstration of a title I plan to use for the web site promotion index. <TITLE>Promoting like a pro is easy using our promotion strategies to promote your web site</TITLE>. This would be carried a little further in the description meta to get the actual first sentence.

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