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The
Search Engine Mystery
By Michelle Roy
Expiry.com Staff Writer
December
2002
They're ambivalent the Search Engines are. One day your site
will be ranked number one, and four days later it will be
ranked twenty-five. How? Why? Who knows for certain? However,
there are some things that you can do with your site that
will allow you to have the confidence that you're doing everything
in your power to rank high.
Search
Engines use Meta Tags (keywords/phrases that are incorporated
into your site's coding) to help people locate you site. Your
website designer will usually take care of the Meta Tagging
of you site. If you submit your site manually to search engines,
they may ask you to describe your site with keywords, phrases,
and descriptions. It is important that you think of all the
possible words, phrases, and combinations that customers could
type in when looking for a site like yours. Use combinations
of words, include your city and state if your business is
local, and use all various forms of possible words. For example,
if you run an online newspaper you would use news paper, paper,
news, and newspaper and other words and combinations to describe
your paper.
Search
Engines are continually changing the code that determines
their rankings. You should make a list of the search engines
you'd like to be listed on and resubmit your site about once
every 3-6 months. Do not submit your site to search engines
every day or every week because many search engines find this
bothersome and could then blacklist your site form their listings.
Some
of the leading search engines are: Excite, Google, WebCrawler,
Lycos, MSN, Northern Light, Alta Vista, Trade Wave Galaxy,
Direct Hit, Hot Bot, Go.com, Magellan, What-U-Seek, Info Tiger,
World Light, Infomaker, Searchopolis, FAST Search, Answers,
Jayde, Yee Haa, Canada.com, Quest Finder, Yahoo, and SimpleSearch.
Whether
or not people will find your site by way of search engines
is where the mystery lies. Do not depend solely on search
engines for your website marketing. Because of the vast size
of the Internet and because you cannot control what words
people will use to search, the odds of your business being
on the first page of search listings is not guaranteed. This
is a harsh fact, I know. But there are no guarantees with
Search Engines, unless you want to start paying them for advertising.
The
more hits your site gets, the more links your site has, the
more times your site is a link on another site, the better
your site's chances are of being listed high. Search Engines
crawl through the Internet looking for sites. They follow
links and advertisements and use their findings as one part
in their rankings.
You
may not be able to guarantee search engine success. What you
can guarantee, however, is that you've done everything in
your power to best help the search engines find and list your
website.
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2000 - 2003 Expiry Corporation.
Permission required to use any content.
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