Tutorial:

Part 1: General Building & Submission

- Why search engines?
- Building relevant pages
- About page optimizing techniques
- Other useful products and services

Why search engines?

Newest measures are showing that around 80 % of all web site visits are being referred by search engine results. A top search engine positioning attracts more visitors than paid advertisement of any kind. I mention "paid" because being number one in search engine results doesn´t cost you anything than the effort to build and submit your pages.

Only a few smaller to mid-size engines proceed with selling search engine results. Altavista figured out that people don´t like paid links. That is why they stopped their "Paid Links" program, an online auction for top positions in popular seach queries. All bigger search engines list sites for free (again), and there will be no change in future, because people want the search engines to show the most relevant sites first, not the most-paying sites.

Building relevant pages

With 800 million web pages out there, how is somebody going to find you? Being listed in search engines may help. But if somebody searches for "dvd videos", and your site named "Tom´s DVD Video Store" appears at position 4,928, you won´t get any visitors at all - besides people already knowing your web address.

Only top positions will carry visitors to your site. The higher the position, the more visitors - it´s that simple! Since search engines rank sites by "relevancy", you must have a site which is "relevant" (concerning the search query) to be displayed at the top of the search results. Opposed to web directories like Yahoo, real search "engines" like AltaVista, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Excite or Webcrawler determine the relevancy of each single site in their database automatically with software algorithms.

Every search engine has it´s own mysterious "formula" of how they "calculate" the relevancy of sites. This formula is secret, and it´s getting modified from time to time. You won´t find any detailed information about how a individual search engine ranks sites. Trying to achieve the highest possible ranking is nevertheless a intelligible attempt if your site´s content corresponds to the search query.

The search engines encourage webmasters to optimize the ranking of their pages through careful use of "meta tags". Please notice that this does not include misleading use of meta tags which are not corresponding with the site content. This is supposed to be "spam" and could lead to the result that your site is getting banned from the search engine database.

About page optimizing techniques

Although the use of meta tags is well known we walk you through the most important meta tags first and show you how to use them:

Keywords

<meta name="keywords" content="keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4,......">

Every keyword used in meta tags should appear at least one time on the visible part of the page. Do not repeat keywords over and over - use similar terms instead. Always take the plural version of a keyword because most search engines will count this as relevant for the singular case automatically. In most cases it will help, if at least one keyword corresponds with the domain name or the URL.

Description

<meta name="description" content="Here comes the description">

The description should reflect the domain name or URL plus it should contain the most important keywords plus it should be a extract of the visible text on the page. This means that the description should contain words which can be found on the page itself too. Both for keywords and description you´ll find requirements regarding maximum length on most search engines "add a url" page. It´s always a good idea to keep keyword and description tags short, since use of more than 250-300 chars may be considered as spam from the search engines and your site may be downgraded. (But normally you won´t get banned).

Title

<meta name="title" content="The Title comes here">

Should reflect the domain name or URL plus contain the targeted keywords within the first 8-12 words. As "Titles" of anything are not too long usually, your page titles shouldn´t be too long also.

Concerning meta tags and site content you should consider that search engines do not only count the total amount of keyword appearance but also, if not even more, the "weight" of a keyword compared to the whole text or tag content. If you use 50 terms in the keyword tag for one single page, the search engine assumes that this page is not as relevant for each one of the used keywords as if you would have used only 8 keywords. Every single keyword has more "weight" if you use less of them.

The over-use of meta tags seems to have made AltaVista rank pages higher if they do not contain ANY keywords or description tags at all (Applies only to one-word-queries, not to 2-or-more-word search phrases). That is why we recommend to make pages WITHOUT keywords and description additionally to the sites with meta tags.

Alt-Tags

<img src="image-name.gif" alt="Alt tag comes here">

The Alt Tag describes the content or intention of an image. It will be displayed instead of the image if somebody has choosen the option "no images" in his browser settings (e.g. for faster browsing). The Alt Tag will be visible as long as someone points his mouse cursor over the image. You don´t have to use Alt Tags within your pages, but you should. They are not THE killer tag to make you number one, but they may improve your ranking somehow at some engines. At least they won´t have any negative effect. Limitations regarding length of Alt Tags apply like they do for the other tags. Hold them somewhere under 200-300 chars.

Comments

<--! Here comes the comment -->

Comments are used to explain the HTML source code of a page, and not to explain the (visible part of the) page itself. Comments are not displayed when a page is viewed with a browser, and they are not intended to hold additional information for search engines. Only a few engines will give your site some relevancy points when they see keywords within comment tags. Overuse of comments with tons of keywords in them may be a reason for downgrading your site.

Visible (text) part of page

This is what people see when they visit your site. Most bigger search engines tend to pay more attention to the visible text part of a site than to meta tags. If the targeted keywords do not appear on the page itself, most likely you won´t get a good ranking, even if you use dozens of meta tags. Extensive use of meta tags with no appearance of the same keywords within the visible text may be considered as spam and your site may be downgraded.

Higher "weight", "frequency" and "prominence" of the keyword within the text will lead your page to be considered as more relevant in most cases. Whereby "prominence" means that the keywords should appear in the first part of the text, e.g. within headlines. "Frequency" is the total amount, and "weight" is the frequency of a keyword relative to the total word count.

Forwarding with meta refresh tag

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="3; url="http://www.target.com/url.html">

This tag is used to forward a visitor to another url after a specified period of time. In our example we used 3 seconds (content="3), which means that the visitor will be forwarded to http://www.name-of-target-url.com/url.html after 3 seconds automatically. The tag can be used e.g. for showing a splash screen first and forwarding to the home page after that.

It is also being used, when a page location or the domain of a site changes and the webmaster doesn´t want to loose the traffic which is still coming to the old site, since this is the one which is listed in search engines.

Sometimes the tag also is used for forwarding visitors from so-named "bridge pages", which have not been created for visitors but for search engines, to the target url for visitors. In this case, the time parameter is often set to 0 (content="0), which means that the visitor will not see this page since he´s getting forwarded to the target url immediately ("after 0 seconds").

Do not use a meta refresh tag with 0 seconds, because this might be considered as spam from several big search engines. Use javascript if you are really in need to forward people immediately (within 0 seconds), e.g. if your site has has moved and you want to forward to your new site automatically without displaying the old one. Javascript "goes through" with most engines, but the most "nospam-secure" is to add an old sytle link with no forwarding stuff at all. The 0-seconds-forwarding script is shown below. You can place it everywhere on the page, but the page will forward faster if you place the script within the <head> and </head> tags or even above the head tags, at the very top of the html code:

<script language="JavaScript">
window.location.replace("http://www.name-of-the-target-url.com/url.html")
</script>

Changing the default directory index

Some bigger search engines rank sites higher if they use the domain name as default top level directory index and the folder´s name for the folder´s default directory index page. When you connect to http://www.any-domain.com without specifying the URL (....any-domain.com/url.html), the webserver of this domain usually will deliver the page index.html or index.htm as default directory index page. You can change the directory index page from default ("index.htm" or "index.html") to something else, e.g. the domain name.

It gives your site additional relevancy on some important engines, and it has no worse effect at the others as far as we see. That is why you should use this, if you can. You cannot on most free webspace hosts, because they often do not enable the webserver module for ".htaccess" files. ".htaccess" is normally being used for password protection, but it can be used for changing the default directory index page also. Hypermart is one of the few free hosts which have enabled .htaccess. At tripod and xoom it doesn´t work. If you pay for your host, you SHOULD have .htaccess enabled, since this is not such a big effort for the hosting company. You also need ftp access to upload the .htaccess file.

1. Create a new file in a plain text editor like Notepad or UltraEdit:
You must write this into this new file:

DirectoryIndex name-of-domain.html

That´s it. Now save the file as ".htaccess", NOT as text-file or something else. If the editor adds the ending .txt to the file automatically it will be ".htaccess.txt", and that won´t work. Force the editor to save it exactly as ".htaccess".

2. Upload the ".htaccess" file with ftp to your web server. It MUST be uploaded in "asci" mode, not in binary or auto mode. Otherwise it won´t work. Now rename your default top level index site (index.html or index.htm) on the server to the name of the domain, as you specified in the .htaccess file.

3. If you connect to www.your-domain.com and the server doesn´t serve the renamed page, the .htaccess module has not been enabled on your web server, or you did something wrong.

Now you can submit your site as "http://www.your-domain.com/" (without the url.html-ending). Some engines will recognize that the default index page delivered by the web server has the same name as the domain name, and this will improve your ranking a little bit on that engine.

Domain name and URL

On most search engines the domain name itself will not influence your ranking as much as you might think. If somebody searches for "mp3 files" and your domain name is "mp3-files.com" there´s no guarantee that you show up first within the search results. You might be number 1 for other reasons, but you can be at position 7083 also, since the domain name doesn´t do the work for you. Most engines assume that the domain name has to do with the company name and not with the product name in any case. They expect the domain name to appear in the pages several times, e.g. in keywords, description and in the text itself, but the domain name doesn´t have to contain the keyword(s).

Subdomains like http://subdomain.your-domain.com often improve the page relevancy if they contain the targeted keyword. It´s often better than if the (main) domain-name itself contains the keyword. You cannot make subdomains on free hosts, and even on many paid hosts, but you SHOULD be able to do so, since they are rather important for search engine ranking. It´s definitely better to structure the site like:
subdomain1.your-domain.com, subdomain2.your-domain.com ...
than with folders:
www.your-domain.com/folder1/, www.your-domain.com/folder2/ ...

A further goodie with subdomains is that many engines count them as a new domain or as "almost" new domain. This means that you can submit more pages the same day (max. amount for each subdomain) and you will have links to your main page from several "almost outside" domains.

The URL (folders and ..html part) doesn´t have to contain the keyword, but the words included in the URL should appear somewhere on the page itself. There should be some kind of "integrity" of URL and page content. This means that the page text should contain words appearing in the URL. There should be a "reason" why you named the URL as you did. If you name your URL http://www.your-domain.com/mov/act01.html the page text might contain something like "Action Movies, Part 1" or so. We have abbreviated the words in the URL and it is a good idea to do so, since this is how URL´s normally are, and therefore the engines expect URL´s to contain abbreviated terms of words which appear in full length in the text and the meta tags. It´s often better to use the abbreviation than the complete word or phrase within the URL. This also applies to (main) domain names on some engines.

Link Popularity

This seems to become a killer criterion for popular keywords. As the number of relevant pages for popular search terms is growing very fast, more and more search engines have raised the "weight" of the criterion "links from outside domains". This means that most probably a site will get a reasonable amount of extra relevancy points for any outside-domain site (which might be relevant too) linking to this site, because the search engine "assumes", that the site must be somehow relevant, "if that many people link to that site...".

Other tips

Instead of telling you that you should create your pages exactly like this and that, we give you some interesting and useful tips about what you can learn while proper reading actual search engine results. Since search engines modify their ranking algorithms regularly (and they would do so any time we publish something "secret" about an individual search engine) it´s better to learn how search engines work:
You should search for something popular (because there will be more pages in the database and therefore more ranking criteria will apply) in any search engine and then read the search results carefully.

The page size (kb, word count). Does the engine seem to prefer bigger or smaller sites? Some engines do not give much relevancy points if you have only a few, e.g. only 10 words on the whole page. If this applies you might improve your ranking by re-organizing your site to more or less (but bigger) pages.

The file date: Some search engines may list newest sites better than older ones. Or older ones better, since they are longer "on the web". Some months ago somebody nearly "hacked" a very popular search engine through submitting many pages with file date "Jan 01 1970". (this can´t be done with windows, but unix allows file dates like 01-01-1970). The search engine ranked these sites very high at very popular search queries. There seemed to be something like "the older the more relevant" within the search engine´s ranking algorithm. Meanwhile they changed it. If a search engine prefers newer sites it might help to update your pages and re-submit them.

The submission time: Some engines favour sites which have been submitted at a specific time, e.g. some minutes before midnight. The reason may be that the search engine takes all pages which have been submitted till 0:00 and adds them to the database for the next day, starting in reverse order with the pages which have been submitted at last (till deadline 0:00).

"Rarest Combinations": This is a curious but often used criterion when a huge amount of sites in the engine´s database has nearly the same relevancy regarding the other (probably more important) criteria. In this case more and more engines tend to "invent" additional criteria, which let them break down the left over all-same-relevancy sites to a hit list with number 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. That is why a page named "bloody downloads" may be considered as more relevant for the keyword "downloads" than a page named "free downloads", escpecially if the two pages would have the same relevancy regarding the more important relevancy criteria.

"Integrity": It´s the same as "rarest combinations". It may apply if other criteria are not enough for breaking down the most relevant pages into a exact 1,2,3 list. Integrity means, that the domain name is corresponding with the page content, e.g. if the domain name is appearing - probably in several combinations - in text, tags, email, links etc..

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