Search
Engines
A search engine is an index of keywords used to find
relevant web pages. Websites use keywords to describe the content of web
pages to search engines. Search engines use the
information contained on your web page to add keywords to its
index. Users who visit search engines enter search words or
combinations of words (search phrases) to find web pages having
content they want to find. The Internet contains billions of web
pages and driving traffic from the search engines to your
website requires that it be found at or near the top of the
search results.
Search Engine Optimization
Getting to the top of the search results is called Search Engine
Optimization. To optimize your website you must enter your
keywords, along with your keyword phrases, near the beginning of
the TITLE tag, DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS meta tags and also in
the body of your web pages. The more often your keywords appear,
and the nearer they appear, to the beginning of the tags and
pages, the more likely you are to achieve your search engine
optimization.
The TITLE tag is your most important tag. The beginning of this
tag should be the search phrase that users enter into a search
engine. The DESCRIPTION meta tag is the next important tag. It
is a plain English sentence containing your keywords. If you do
not include this tag the search engine will attempt to create
one for you that will usually be useless. Never stuff a list of
keywords for your description as some search engines will
penalize or ban your website. The KEYWORDS meta tag is not used
by all search engines. Some prefer to use your page content to
acquire keywords. You should include your keywords only once.
Repetition of keywords can be viewed as "Spam" and
your website may be penalized or banned. ALT tags are useful in
achieving sufficient keyword density (search engines calculate
the number of times keywords appear on a web page to find
potential spammers). Copywriting your keywords and phrases in
these tags and your page content will help improve your search
engine optimization results.
Your Home Page is your most important keyword page. It should
contain the most keywords and phrases. Search engines place more
importance on keywords found in one of your pages if it is also
found on your home page. Most users enter keyword combinations
instead of a single keyword. Include misspelled keywords if your
keywords are difficult to spell (i.e. optimization or
optimization).
Search Engine Submission
Each search engine is unique and submitting your website
criteria into each search engine is an extremely time consuming
process. You must follow each search engines submission rules
precisely or you could be penalized or banned. There are
automated services (free and pay) that perform this service.
However, some search engines will BAN your website for using an
automated service. Search engines also changes their criteria
periodically (each one is in effect competing with the others to
provide the "best" search results) which requires
websites to be resubmitted in order to stay in the search engine
results.
The search engines themselves use programs called
"spiders" and "crawlers" that search for
websites on the internet. Over time these programs will find
your website. For people who do not want to wait months to be
indexed they can pay an internet directory firm to list them
faster.
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