Increasing the Number of Hits from Search Engines
1. Name things carefully!
- Most search engines "find" your pages using (at least) the names and/or URL's.
So, use descriptive names in your page title, key words, and
file names.
2. Think about the words and phrases you have in your page.
Many search engines tabulate the frequency of words and phrases on
the page and use that to decide whether or not to show your page when
performing a search. For example, Altavista will index all words in your document
(except for comments), and will use the first few words of the document as a short
abstract.
Know about "subtle" word usage such as that on this example page.
3. Register your pages; otherwise you wait until the web crawler for each search engine finds your page.
Most search engines have some way of adding or deleting a URL from the database they consider. Use that registration.
- Example: Add a URL
- These are getting harder to find on the busier pages we see these days.
- You can register with services such as Submit It!
- You can register with subscription services such as Real Names Subscription
4. Use Metatags to increase the likelihood that the page will be found.
It is however possible for you to control how your page is indexed by using META tags to specify both additional keywords to index, and a short description.
<META name="description" content="We provide advice on how companies can increase the likelihood of being found by prospective customers.">
<META name="keywords" content="e-commerce, customers, increased visibility">
Search engines will then do two things:
It will index fields as words so these terms (whether or not they appear in the body of the page) will turn up in a search.
It will return the description with the URL. In other words, instead of showing the first couple of lines of the page,
Business Web Design Studio
- We provide advice on how companies can increase the likelihood of being found by prospective customers
http://www.umsl.edu/~sauter/studio/guidelines_for_hits.html - size 3k - 26 Jun 01.
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5. Use Metatages to exclude your pages from a search.
Adding the line below will prevent a crawler from adding a page to its index and links on the page will not be followed.
<META name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow">
There are four generally accepted kinds of tags:
- NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
- NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
- NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
- NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.
6. See also Search Engine Features For Webmasters and especially their summary of key features.
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