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What do Search Engines look for?

Portland , ME -

• Keywords

  Keywords are words and phrases that people type into search engines so that those engines will know what to look for. Below are some thoughts on where to put those keywords.

  
  

• A Domain

  Some search engines look at the domain name for keywords. Domain names are now allowed to be up to 63 characters long. It may be worth the money, which can as little as $150 US for ten years, to register another domain name or two that point to the site. These should start with your_company_name- and continue on with the various keywords. The hyphen is an important delimiter or spacer. Domain names that end with .com are often looked at before others.

  
  

• A Title

  Many search engines look at the title of the page. 80 characters are allowed, use them all. Be sure to include the most important keywords in the title.

  
  

• Meta tags

  Meta tags are pieces of code that describe the page and list keywords. They can also tell the search engines when to come back and relist and in what category to list the page. It can be helpful to repeat your really important keywords. Although repeating them too much can hurt your rating.

  
  

• Comments

  Some search engines look at the comments in the page. Be sure to add a comment tag with a description full of keywords at the top of the page.

  
  

• Text

  Some search engines will look at the first 200 characters of text. If your page uses frames make sure there is some descriptive text loaded with keywords in the no frames tags.

  
  

• A Copyright Statement

  A good idea anyway and some search engines give more weight to older sites. This can be put either as a comment or as part of the text on the page.

  
  

• Links

  Some search engines rate a site that other sites have linked to higher than one with not so many links. Some won't even list a site that less than a minimum number of pages have linked to it. One way to get around this is to make sure that every page has a link to every other page with a transparent 1 pixel by 1 pixel GIF.

  This can be dangerous with a site that uses frames as it increases the chance that a page will be hit without the frame. A link to the home page is a good idea for every page. This will make sure that if a user gets to a page without going to the home page first. That user will be able to find the home page and if they click on it from within the frame it will take them to a new window rather than making them look at a frame within a frame.

  
  

• A listing in their database

  While search engines may claim to search the entire web they don't. At best they search around 33% of it. They absolutely give more weight to sites that have been submitted. Sites should be resubmitted about every three months or whenever there is a change. Some engines will ban a site that has been resubmitted to often or that uses an automatic submitter to submit to many sites at once.

Take Care And Have Fun.