Henry's WWW Visibility Tips

Introduction

There are many aspects to WWW Visibility.

• Users that know your company name, and know you have a page, but dont know the URL. They will type in "company name" to a major search engine.
• Users that want something specific, like to buy car tires. They will type in "car tires", but not your company name.

Document Title

The title should include a descriptive phrase as well as the organization or product name. Note that the title will likely come up in a search engine result table, and should read clearly. The TITLE should be from 5-15 words in length, including a descriptive phrase. Avoid blank or one word titles. The text in the title is the primary way pages can obtain high visibility in the search engines.

Document Text

• Only the first 200 words of the document are indexed.
• It is not polite to repeat words intentionally in the document to increase the relevance in the search engines.
• The use of synonyms can be very effective. Use both "automobile" and "car" for Example.

META tags

Most of the major search engines can use META tags to help in indexing the site.
Google, Yahoo, AltaVista and InfoSeek use META tags.

All META tags must occur within the HEAD declaration in the document, or they will be ignored by the search engine robots.

Note that META tags are a general purpose tool, not all META tags are for search engines.

• DESCRIPTION
  
  • Example:
    

    < META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Henry Heikkinen's Home Page" >

    If you do not use the description tag, the first 20 words or so on the page are used. Sometimes this may look very confusing. Some WWW developers tailor the body of the text very carefully for visibility and to have a sensible title generated.

    It is a good idea to use synonyms when possible,

• KEYWORDS
  
  • Example:
    

    < META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="here,are,my,keywords" >

  • Do not put spaces in the keywords, use quotes when referring to more than one word as a single keyword i.e. surfing,"Santa Cruz",music....
  • It is OK to use either commas or spaces.
  • Do not capitalize any of the keywords
  • Do not repeat words more than twice. Some search engines will reject you if they detect an intentional attempt to raise your relevance.
  • You can use up to 1000 characters (about 150 words) for the keywords META tag
  • You can use up to 2000 characters for the description META tag
• ROBOTS
  

  < META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index,follow" >

Keywords in the Comment Fields

Although there is some disagreement how effective keywords which are placed in the comment sections can be, it may be worthwhile. This is done by using the syntax:

<!-- blah,blah,here,are,my,keywords --!>

The robots.txt file

Links to other pages on your site.

Considerations when using Frames

Although frames can present the site in a very organized manner, it creates may problems when tracking and indexing the site. All of the top level frames should be submitted to the search engines. Place META tags in the topmost document (usually index.html) even if there is not text content.

With a frames page, its very possible that someone may NOT enter from the top, this is not generally taken into consideration. Similarly, the robot may not be coming in from the top, it is important to help show the way via links to HOME, etc.

Announcing your site (Free)

Before you announce your site, ensure that you have the proper content for indexing. Some search engines will not re-index for a long time, if ever.

A very effective and little known strategy is to submit EVERY page in your site to be indexed by the search engines. The "follow" directive for the "ROBOTS" tag in theory will cause your entire site to be traversed. It extremely difficult to tell the difference between a page which represents a distinct WWW site and a page which is a part of a site.

Announcing your site for Free

• A list of WWW promotion services for free