12 Hot Tips for Getting Listed in the Search Engines

You've just spent ages on your new web site, it looks great and you want to start attracting traffic as soon as possible, preferably yesterday. Here's a checklist of some of the most important things to make sure you do before you submit your web site to the search engines:

Complete the Site

1. Make sure your site is complete and doesn't have any 'under construction' signs on it. If people arrive at your site when it is in an obviously unfinished state you may lose those visitors forever. Web sites evolve and change of course, but you want yours to look competent, proofread and complete before inviting visitors to it.

Make your first sentence count

2. Try and make sure that the first sentence on your web site sums up the content or function of the web site. The first 25 words or so of the first sentence on the front page are what most search engines use to index your site. Make sure they're relevant.

Give each page a unique title

3. Make sure you give each page of your web site a title. Search engines often index pages using their title. The page title should describe the content of the page. Use keywords in your titles, whilst making sure they still make sense. Try and use different titles on different pages so that the title always describes the content of the page in question.

Use 'alt' tags

4. Use 'alt' tags on the graphics in your web site. This not only helps visually impaired visitors, who may use page readers, but will also help search engines to index the web site.

Use Meta Tags

5. Next, use meta tags. Not all search engines use meta tags to index web sites, but most do. You will need a meta tag 'description' of the page. Again use the kind of keywords in the 'description' meta tag of the web site that you think a visitor might type into a search engine. You will also need a 'keywords' meta tag. Think of at least 60 words relating to the content of your web site. Type the words using capitalisation and lower case and sometimes it pays to include misspellings of your keywords as people often mistype. Don't repeat any keyword more than 6 or so times if you can help it. Search engines might penalise you for repeating a word too many times.

Get Search Engine Spiders to Come Back

6. Another good meta tag to use is this: <META NAME="revisit" CONTENT="15 days"> This tells spiders (search engine indexing robots) to revisit your site every 15 days. If your site changes less often, set the days to a higher value.

Make sure every page is indexed

7. You can also use this tag: <META NAME="robots" CONTENT="index,follow"> to instruct the spiders to follow all the links in your web site and index all the pages.

Site Submission Tools

8. A good place to go to submit your web site to the search engines is: http://resources.hitbox.com/cgi-bin/page.cgi?tools/sub

Directories

9. You'll notice that you have to submit your web site to some of the directories by going to their web site, selecting the right category and then adding your site. Examples of this are yahoo.com and search.aol.com. This is because some search engines are constructed by people and resemble directories rather than search engines. It can be harder to get listed on these directories and usually takes much longer.

10. Getting listed in directories such as Yahoo can be well worth the effort, however, as they usually generate a lot of traffic.

Reciprocal Links

11. Some search engines rank sites by the amount of other sites that link to them, so persuading others to link to your site is very important and is probably the number one way to drive traffic to your site.

Persevere

12. Once you have begun submitting your site to the search engines my best advice is just to keep doing it. You must re-submit your site to the search engines regularly. Perseverance pays off.

Copyright © 2000 Ruth Arnold (ruth@spacehoppa.com)