Cyberteknix Hosting - Guide to Search Engines

META Tags

Search Engine Listing

Search Engine Positioning

META Tags

Meta tags provide a useful way to control your summary in some search engines. Meta tags can also help you provide keywords and descriptions on pages that for various reasons lack text. Examples are splash pages and frames pages. They might also boost your page's relevancy. However, simply including a meta tag is not a guarantee that your page should suddenly leap to the top of every search engine listing. They are a useful tool but, as said above, not a magic solution.

To figure all of this out, let's construct an example and look at each piece of it. Let's go to AltaVista and search for a frog site...

OK. Here we are at AltaVista. I've searched for 'frogs' and on page 6 of the response I found this entry:

Pet Exotic - Frogs
Frogs ] White's Tree Frog (Pelodryas caerulea) $20. 2 @ $15 each / 5+ @ $12.50 each. [ Back to Top]
http://www.herp.com/pet/frog.html - size 628 bytes - 11 Apr 96

Isn't that informative? After looking through 6 pages of listings for frogs, would you run over to this site? The person that spent his or her hard earned spare time to build that page should get a better reward for that much hard work.

What went wrong?

Obviously, the search engine took the first stuff it found that looked like text instead of HTML. It did the best it could with really limited information. The author of the page just didn't construct the page to be indexed by search engines. Let's fix it a piece at a time.

The title isn't bad. It does give some information. But it could be better. Remember, most search engines give more weight to words found in the TITLE, especially if those words are also found in the body of the text. So, a better TITLE might be: "Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas caerulea" This is much more informative and likely to generate more solid keywords in the search engines. Especially if we refer to these same words in the body of the page (or in our other heading sections.) Here's what we have so far:

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas caerulea</TITLE>

Now, let's give the search engines that don't use meta tags some copy to look at that we want used in the description. We do this by placing a short comment into the page after the TITLE tag. Now our page looks like this:

This takes us to your first meta tag: Description. We now give the search engines that use meta tags the description of the page that we want to have displayed when our page comes up in a search. Don't make it too long, as the engines will only give a limited amount of text.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas caerulea</TITLE>

<META Name="description" Content="Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online today.">

Now we have told the engines what to say about our site, but we still want to tell them what keywords we would like to be found under. Please DON'T put keywords in here just to get traffic. Imagine that you are running a restaurant. Your sign outside can bring in lots of look-e-loos, but if they don't buy, they just get in the way. They take up time and space that could be used to take better care of your real customers. Measure your success by sales (or whatever is relevant to your site) and not by pounds of visitors you con into coming to your site.

Current thinking is that when it comes to meta tags, less is more. Overloading your keyword meta tag with a diverse collection of keywords only waters down their impact on your rankings. Try using only 5 to 7 keywords on each page, but use different ones on different pages.

Now our entry in the Alta Vista results should look something like this:

Pet Exotic Frogs For Sale: White's Tree Frog - Pelodryas caerulea
Best prices on pet exotic frogs anywhere on the internet. These White's Tree Frogs can be shipped overnight to arrive healthy and happy. Order online today
http://www.herp.com/pet/frog.html - size 1628 bytes - 11 Feb 97

We have now built a good heading for our page that will give better information to any search engine that stops in to look us over. We have given our search words, a short description, put good search words in the title. Things are looking pretty good. Now we should have a better chance of being indexed correctly, and we haven't Spammed. We haven't overloaded our page with keyword repetitions that could get us penalized. And even the engines that stop short on a page will find us.

Oh, didn't I mention that some of the robots and spiders stop when they run into certain things on a page. Some stop when they run into a JAVA applet. Building a good header like the one above means the spider will have found enough information ahead of the applet to give you a meaningful entry.

But, which search engines will this help with? Let's take a look:

AltaVista

Meta tags supported? Yes
Spamming penalty? Yes

Excite

Meta tags supported? Description tag only
Spamming penalty? Yes

HotBot

Meta tags supported? Yes
Spamming penalty? Yes

InfoSeek

Meta tags supported? Yes
Spamming penalty? Yes

Lycos

Meta tags supported? No
Spamming penalty? Yes

Northern Light

Meta tags supported? No
Spamming penalty? No

Web Crawler

Meta tags supported? Description tag only
Spamming penalty? Yes

If you are having a hard time creating your own META Tags the following sites will generate them for you for free:

Search Engine Listing

The World Wide Web is "indexed" through the use of search engines, which are also referred to as "spiders," "robots," "crawlers," or "worms". These search engines comb through the Web documents, identifying text that is the basis for keyword searching.

Each search engine works in a different way. Some engines scan for information in the title or header of the document; others look at the bold "headings" on the page for their information. The fact that search engines gather information differently means that each will probably yield different results. Therefore, it's wise to try more than one search engine when doing Web searching.

Below we've listed several search engines. There is a link to the search engines main page where you may conduct searchs or a link to their "submission" page where you may add your URL if you have not already.

AltaVista Submit to AltaVista	AOL NetFind Submit to AOL NetFind	Excite Submit to Excite
Google Submit to Google	HotBot Submit to HotBot	Infoseek Submit to Infoseek
Internet Explorer Submit to Internet Explorer	Looksmart Submit to Looksmart	Lycos Submit to Lycos
Magellan Submit to Magellan	Go2Net Submit to Go2Net	Netscape Submit to Netscape
Northern Light Submit to Northern Light	Snap Submit to Snap	WebCrawler Submit to WebCrawler
	Yahoo Submit to Yahoo

Now that you have your web site listed, click here to find out how to get a better listing.

Search Engine Positioning

So tell me, exactly how do the search engines rank pages? How can I get my pages at the top?

Search engines use complex and proprietary algorithms to rank web pages according to a variety of factors. The search engine companies keep their algorithms very secret for competitive reasons, and to prevent people from making pages that spam them. By reverse engineering it is possible, but difficult and very time consuming, to come very close to knowing exactly how a particular search engine ranks pages and thus be able to make pages that rank extremely well. It is not possible to know with 100% accuracy the exact formula used by a search engine because:

To do so would require that you reverse engineer using several 100% perfectly scoring web pages, which do not exist!
Other factors beyond your control or HTML design also play a small role in search engine positioning.

The good news is that you do not have to be 100% accurate to score well and you do not have to reverse-engineer the search results yourself! You can use existing resources to make pages that will score in the top 10 positions, or at least in the top 30. AND THAT'S GREAT FOR YOUR WEB SITE! The pages that are created specifically to rank highly on search engine results are commonly known as doorway pages (or gateway, entry, or bridge pages).

What factors go into the calculation?

Ranking criteria varies from search engine to search engine. Most calculate page rankings based on these elements:

Prominence of the keyword searched in the viewable text
Frequency of the keyword searched in the viewable text
Site Popularity
"Weight" of the keywords
Proximity of keywords
Keyword Placement
Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the <TITLE> tag(s)
Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the <META NAME="DESCRIPTION">
Prominence, frequency, and weight of keywords in the <META NAME="KEYWORD">
Keywords in <H1> or other headline tags
Keywords in the <A HREF="http://yourcompany.com/page.htm"></A> link tags
Keywords in ALT tags
Keywords in <!-- > comment tags
Keywords contained in the <INPUT TYPE="HIDDEN" NAME="HIDDEN" VALUE="include list of keywords here"> the hidden form tag
Keywords contained in the URL or site address, e.g., http://www.keyword.com/keyword.htm
Grammatical correctness and natural-sounding word patterns
Absence of formatting, repetition, and word arrangement that could be considered as spam.

Each engine has lower and upper limits or thresholds for each variable and criteria. This protects it against spammers and that is why simply repeating keywords will not work.

Doorways: A solution to a dilemma

All said, you need to have pages designed specifically to rank highly in search engines. A doorway page is simply a page that has been created for the sole purpose of ranking higher in the search engines for a particular keyword or set of keywords. These pages act as "doorways" to the real content of your site, without having to redesign or modify content in your current web site's pages. A doorway is designed for the search engines, to make the search engines "happy". The doorway page then links to your main site and takes your visitors there.

A web site is designed for people, to make people "happy", to fill a need, make money, whatever. However, what is good for people is not always good for the search engine. If, for example, you have a web site that has a lot of graphics and hardly any text, or one that runs on a database and creates dynamically generated pages, or one that is in a highly competitive area, or even one that deals with a wide variety of general topics, chances are that your pages will rank very poorly on search engine rankings.

This creates a serious dilemma: how to make web pages that are both pleasing, useful, and logical to humans, and at the same time super-friendly to search engines.

Doorway pages help you solve these troubling dilemmas. You can keep your current web site as it is and create dozens of doorway pages, each optimized to rank well for a different keyword in a different engine. Typically, when targeting 10 keywords, across 5 search engines, you will end up with 50 pages pointing to your home page or other section on your site. Do not worry as this is not unusual, and search engines will not penalize you as long as your doorway pages are professional and honest, and so is your submission. You will want your Web site to be found under several keywords that your prospects are likely to search by. For this reason, you will want to create separate pages that emphasize each of those keywords/phrases and rank well for each search engine. On average, to cover all possibilities, you need to make doorways for about 50 keywords or phrases related to your product or service, for each of the top search engines. That is extremely powerful online marketing!

I am concerned. Are doorways ethical? Are they considered as spam by the search engines?

Before getting started on using doorways to improve your search engine ranking, you need to know a little about spam and spamdexing. Spamming the search engines (or spamdexing) is the practice of using unethical or unprofessional techniques to try to improve search engine rankings. You should be aware of what constitutes spamming to avoid trouble with the search engines. Generally, it is very easy to know what not to do to avoid being called a spammer. By following a few simple rules, you can safely improve your search engine rankings without spamming the engines.

What constitutes spam?

Some techniques are clearly considered as an attempt to spam the engines. Where possible, you should avoid these:

Keyword stuffing. This is the repeated use of a word to increase its frequency on a page. Search engines now have the ability to analyze a page and determine whether the frequency is above a "normal" level in proportion to the rest of the words in the document.
Invisible text. Some webmasters stuff keywords at the bottom of a page and make their text color the same as that of the page background. This is also detectable by the engines.
Tiny text. Same as invisible text but with tiny, illegible text.
Page redirects. Some engines, especially Infoseek, do not like pages that take the user to another page without his or her intervention, e.g. using META refresh tags, cgi scripts, Java, JavaScript, or server side techniques.
META tags stuffing. Do not repeat your keywords in the META tags more than once, and do not use keywords that are unrelated to the content of your site.
Unrelated keywords. Never use keywords that do not apply to the content of your site.
Too many doorways with similar keywords. Do not create too many doorways with very similar keywords.
Duplicate submissions. Do not submit the same page more than once on the same day to the same search engine.
Identical pages. Do not submit virtually identical pages, i.e. do not simply duplicate a web page, give the copies different file names, and submit them all. That will be interpreted as an attempt to flood the engine.
Code swapping. Do not optimize a page for top ranking, and then swap another page in its place once a top ranking is achieved.
Doorways to directories. Do not submit doorways to directories like Yahoo They are only good for use with search engines and not with directories.
Oversubmission. Do not submit more than the allowed number of pages per engine per day or week (see below table).

	AltaVista	HotBot	Excite	Lycos	Infoseek
Time to index a submitted page	1-2 days	2 days	3-4 weeks	2-4 weeks	1 day
Time to index a page that is spidered/crawled by the search engine spider	About 2 weeks	About 2 weeks	3-4 weeks	2-4 weeks	Rarely spiders
Maximum number of page submissions allowed per period (please note that this is not the total number of pages that can be indexed, it is just the total number that can be submitted. If you can only submit 25 pages to Excite, for example, and you have a 1000 page site, that's no problem. The search engine will come crawling your site and index all pages, including those that you did not submit).	1-10 pages per day.	50 pages per day.	25 pages per week.	N/A	50 pages per day, unlimited when using e-mail submissions.

Gray Areas

There are certain practices that can be considered spam by the search engine when they are actually just part of honest web site design. For example, Infoseek does not index any page with a fast page refresh. Yet, refresh tags are commonly used by web site designers to produce visual effects or to take people to a new location of a page that has been moved. Also, some engines look at the text color and background color and if they match, that page is considered spam. You could have a page with a white background and a black table somewhere with white text in it. Although perfectly legible and legitimate, that page will be ignored by some engines. Another example is that Infoseek advises against (but does not seem to drop from the index) having many pages with links to one page. Even though this is meant to discourage spammers, it also places many legitimate webmasters in the spam region (almost anyone with a large web site or a web site with an online forum always has their pages linking back to the home page). These are just a few examples of gray areas in this business. Fortunately, because the search engine people know that they exist, they will not penalize your entire site just because of them.

What are the penalties for spamdexing?

There is an inappropriate amount of fear over the penalties of spamming. Many webmasters fear that they may spam the engines without their knowledge and then have their entire site banned from the engines forever. That just does not happen! The people who run the search engines know that you can be a perfectly legitimate and honest web site owner who, because of the nature of your web site, has pages that appear to be spam to the engine. They know that their search engines are not smart enough to know exactly who is spamming and who happens to be in the spam zone by mistake. Therefore, they do not generally ban your entire site from their search engine just because some of your pages look like spam. They only penalize the rankings of the offending pages. Any non-offending page is not penalized. Only in the most extreme cases, where you aggressively spam them and go against the recommendations above, flooding their engine with spam pages, will they ban your entire site. Some engines, like HotBot, do not even have a lifetime ban policy on spammers.

As long as you are not an intentional and aggressive spammer, you should not worry about your entire site being penalized or banned from the engines. Only the offending pages will have their ranking penalized. Our doorways are created with all the current rules in mind to ensure that you can safely position your site better on the engines.

Is there room for responsible search engine positioning?

Yes! Definitely! In fact, the search engines do not discourage responsible search engine positioning. Responsible search engine position is good for everybody - it helps the users find the sites they are looking for, it helps the engines do a better job of delivering relevant results, and it gets you the traffic you want!