RE: [cobalt-users] Robots.txt, completely off topic, more info on search engines

["Simon Watts" <simon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----Original Message-----
From: cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:cobalt-users-admin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Elmer Fuddpucker
Sent: 21 June 2001 00:35
To: cobalt-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [cobalt-users] Robots.txt


On Wed, 20 Jun 2001, Carrie Bartkowiak wrote:

} Any more gems re: search engines you'd like to share? I had 113 visits
} to the server from different crawlers yesterday, and I think more tips
} like that would be really appreciated by my clients. I know I'd
} appreciate them.  ;)

Hi Carrie,

>My personal experience is
 that putting sites on the top of an applicable (applicable being the
 keyword here) search result is pretty darn easy to do. So easy that
 anyone can do it - absolutely anyone.

>	The trick, if I may call it that, is to put your attention
 on the basics. Tightly focused, hard-hitting text (study the
 techniques used by copyrighters - your librarian will be more than
 glad to help you with this) on fast loading pages supported by good,
 solid HTML combined with a few links from quality external sites and
 you are all but there - on top of the search engine listings.


>	brent

Hi Carrie....again

I'll agree entirely with Brent on this one. BUT I'll give you a little more!

Apologies for the long post, but I do tend to waffle

Any site which is dependent upon traffic from search engines needs to follow
these 12 basic steps, although few do.

As Brent says, focussing on the basics is a far better method, and less
stressful one, of gaining meaningful results.
But what are the basics?
First and foremost, you need to decide, for any site, what the prime focus
is. Cherry pick the results you want. Put yourself in the seat of the
average net surfer and imagine, if they were looking for your
product/service how they might try to search for it. Come up with a list of
around 10 different phrases (not words because they yield too wide a
result). Make a note of them.
Second; Set the page title to include the "most valuable" words from the
most likely phrases. So for instance if you were selling Computer Graphics
Software, this should appear in the title along with other words to build up
a short description (max recommended 224 chars). Include location and
country if your site is of a geographical nature, ie you only wish to sell
into one geographical market. All my sites are UK based so they all get UK
in their title.
Third; Although it is often too late to do so, consider buying a domain name
which includes the most important keyword in your stack. (Go do a single
word search in Google and look carefully at the results. Almost always, the
sites in the top 10 have the word you searched in their domain.
Fourth; Include a COMPLETE set of meta tags. Not just keywords and
description, but "author", "reply-to" etc. reply-to implies ownership and
acceptance of responsibility, so can score you an extra fraction of a %
Fifth; Rate your site with ICRA. Rated sites score higher than an identical
unrated site.
Six; Description and keywords tags should repeat all the keywords in your
title, but no word should be repeated any more than 3 times in each tag.
Seven; Structure your keywords tag, such that you can pick out phrases from
the line of words with the words in a logical order, so for example you
should be able to read along the line of words and pick out the words
"computer graphics software" in that order, not "software graphics computer"
(match order can score higher results). Similarly, not all engines index in
the same way, so you need to list plurals and caps versions, ie bike, bikes,
Bike, Bikes
Eight; Include ALT tags for ALL images on home/index page. Engines like
Google ignore meta tags completely and look for qualified text on page. ALT
tags are often included in this. (anyway, if someone browses with images
off, would they know what your site was about with out them?
Nine; Don't use images where text would suffice. engines can't "see" images.
Ten, Don't attempt to cheat. Don't put <h6> text of same colour (or even
similar) onto your page to stuff extra keywords in. Engines are getting
cleverer by the month. This keyword "spamming" or keyword "stuffing" used to
work but is now being frowned upon by a large number of the biggest engines.
Eleven; Make sure the text on your index/home page has a high keyword
density, ie get rid of non specific messages on first page. Pump the text up
with additional phrases (using your list of 10 or so) to fill in the gaps.
( I specialise in bike shop sites and try to incorporate all the following
words into the title and page text to cover all possibilities; bike, bikes,
cycle, cycles, bicycle, bicycles. Having said that it's not always feasable
because clients don't listen to advice!)
Twelve; If your site uses frames, and a great many do, NEVER have your index
page as a frameset. Search engines cannot, and do not, lift content out of
embedded pages when referencing the root domain. As a result, many sites get
listed with "This site uses frames but your browser doesn't support them"
There are no keywords here for the serah engine to use so unless the site
title is a particularly good match these sites will rarely be top of the
pile. If you must use a frameset page for index.html, then ensure that the
<noframes> tag is filled with a real page (just incase a visitor can't see
frames, as much as for search engines. In this instance you can use the
<noframes> tag to text only refer to the contents of your site. (most users
CAN see frames)

There is more, but these basics will get results, as long as you targetted
those reults at the outset. I have big discussions with many of my clients
who want to be at the top of google for a search for "bikes" and who simply
don't understand that whilst that result might generate a lot of traffic, it
would be unlikely to generate much business, as each of these searches is
too loose. People searching for services and products tend to perform more
specific searches than just single words.

Hope this helps, even if it isn't Cobalt related.

ps, robots.txt is a cure for only a small number of engines. Many of the
"lesser" engines ignore it completely!

Regards

Si Watts
SiWIS
http://www.siwis.co.uk

Don't just think global, THINK LOCAL!