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Better Search Engine Placement |
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How Content and URLs Affect Search EnginesHaving a domain of your own can be used to raise search engine positions if you index your site to your advantage. You're thinking how right? I will use this site as an example. For navigation and layout purposes I have split this site up into several smaller sites. These are broken down into even smaller sites with specific audiences in mind. The main index page when you visit http://www.xtremewebhosts.com ties all of the HTML code and document layouts together that make up several smaller sites. This is the first page a search engine will see. Therefore, you need to use this page to tie in all the other documents on your web site. The news link takes you to a site about our most recent news. The tutorials link takes you to a site that contains all of our tutorials and helpful documents. The forums link takes you to a public message board where visitors can openly discuss topics and search for questions that may have already been answered. The contact us link takes visitors to our most current contact information and also provides them with a qucik way to contact us by email through a form that they can quickly fill out and submit without opening an email program. The newsletter link allows visitors to subscribe to our newsletters, where we send out regular announcements and promotional items, along with tips for our subscribers. The search link allows visitors to our web site to quickly locate information through keywords they submit. The recommend us link allows a visitor to recommend this web site to someone they know who may benefit from our services or the information on our web site. We also have a seperate tools menu and although at first look, someone might say the information here is the most important, it really is not. I will explain more in a second. Within the tools menu, we have a order web hosting link where visitors can order our web hosting services. We also provide a link for visitors to register a domain name with our registrar at reduced and cheaper prices than InterNIC. We also allow visitors to transfer an existing domain name to us. We provide a WHOIS link for visitors to check the ownership of a domain name, which is useful if you attempt to register a domain name and find it is already registered to someone else. The Domain Name Suggestions link can offer spinoffs of domain names based on the words you submit. This is a nice feature to use if you are having trouble coming up with a catchy domain name, or if all the domain names you want to register all already registered and you need some more ideas. If you registered your domain name with our registrar, you may also log in to manage it here. We provide this link simply as a courtesy to those who would like a central location to manage all of the domain and web site tasks. We provide a search engine submit link so that the registered users of this web site, which includes visitors and clients, may submit their web site free of charge to 18 or more of the most commonly used search engines. This can save you time in search engine submissions. Finally, we provide a convenient way for those who are having problems or would like to ask a question to submit a Trouble Ticket without posting their problem or question in a public forum. To answer your question about why the tools menu is not near as important as you would believe. All of the links within the tools menu are seldom used after a person registers a domain name and signs up for our web hosting service. They may come back and use the search engine submission tool, but that is generally all they ever need unless they need help with a problem. Even still, almost all problems you are likely to face are answered either in the tutorials section or within our forums area.
The above links help search engine rankings in two ways. First of all, on the search engines that index sites and not pages I get sixteen (16) listings instead of one. As I understand the way the search engine spiders and robots think, if it sees an index.html file it thinks it's a different site. The second benefit is it enables me to use, more effectively, the keywords in my meta tags, title and document structure. Remember to link to all the sub-pages that are part of the site so the robot can index those as well. You may want to try to list these yourself because the bot can sometimes take quite a while to get around to it and there are no penalties for this so why not just disregard the information on the site and try and do it yourself. If you use the same keywords in several related documents you could get a long list of your documents placed at the top of the list. If you use Alta Vista you may have noticed this already.
The content of the page will help in better placement on some of the engines because they track the keyword usage in the actual content. In those that use this method, the relative total % of content is weighed. As an author I don't like to continually use the same words over and over, however, if you look at it from this perspective it is very advantageous. WebCrawler and Lycos use keywords contained in the body to give a higher ranking so if placement in these two is important sprinkle keywords throughout the page.
This brings to mind some of the "spamming" techniques used by web authors. "Spamming" is now useless because as quick as webmasters learn a new trick it is penalized by the search engines shortly after it is used widely. Everyone knows the old same color font as background trick, and so they started hiding them in comments <!--keywords or title--> now both are being penalized at all search engines. A rule of thumb should be if you can't see it on the page and it isn't part of the <meta>, <title>, or in the image tag "alt" attribute forget it! It will only penalize your rating, or in some cases, at some of the engines it results in an outright ban for the domain name for up to six months. All I have to say about this is HOORAY for the engines, "spamming" is a researchers nightmare!
Next we will cover how document structure and page layout affects search engine placement.
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Last Updated ( Thursday, 02 December 2004 )
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