Anyone know anything about website promotion and search engine placement?

[|Zach|]

I think it would be cool to be able to make my website a little bit more friendly to the search engines. I know a lot of it has to do with META TAGS. Could someone explain it a little better though? Is there a service that would do a good job? I would be willing to spend a little money I guess but it seems that there are some good ways to do without anyhting like that. Techies? Web Gurus? Bestow your knowlege upon me!

[Phobia]

Well, Ra1dersRocks was pretty good at that, but - uh - he's kinda gone now.

[teedubya]

there is a great trick... where you insert you keywords as the exact same color as your background on your index page... you do some <div>keyword 1 keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 2,</div> then you push the div over into the far left off the margin of your visible webpage. No one can see the coded keywords, except the search engine bots...

it has worked wonders for my sites for years.

It is best accomplished with Dreamweaver.

That is all.

[|Zach|]

Well, Ra1dersRocks was pretty good at that, but - uh - he's kinda gone now.
Yes he kept going on and on about how he would help me out with this kind of thing if I dropped him a PM...so I did this...no answer...sent another PM...nothing...

Thanks RR.

[|Zach|]

there is a great trick... where you insert you keywords as the exact same color as your background on your index page... you do some <div>keyword 1 keyword 1, keyword 2, keyword 2,</div> then you push the div over into the far left off the margin of your visible webpage. No one can see the coded keywords, except the search engine bots...

it has worked wonders for my sites for years.

It is best accomplished with Dreamweaver.

That is all.
Hmmm my home page has a delicate balance that I am always nervous to get things all jumbled esp with a sidebar...althought its worth some testing i could make that work.

[teedubya]

its not a sidebar. It is NOT a frame. it is invisible to the naked eye. Do you use Dreamweaver or what?

[|Zach|]

its not a sidebar. It is NOT a frame. it is invisible to the naked eye. Do you use Dreamweaver or what?
I generally just put in HTML in notepad. I know it isnt any of those things itself but I still wonder if it could throw off the alignment of other things.

[teedubya]

keywords in meta tags work but not as well as a well hidden div with your key words placed in pairs...

but your website is gay anyway, so who cares if anyone actually goes there, right? eh, purse boy?

[|Zach|]

.

but your website is gay anyway, so who cares if anyone actually goes there, right? eh, purse boy?
ok.... :spock:

[Pants]

Don be messin wif da Ali, aigh? He'f got mad skillz, innit. Respek. Big up.

[teedubya]

Biggie ups yo'self, Aiiiii?! Zachishere.com is for real gh3y, innit?

check out da for real www.methodlab.com (http://www.methodlab.com) look at the index page source code and see the div code with all the keywords in the frame. And see how Daddy Ali Chi3fs roll.

[Pants]

Yo dat if one wicked site, aaaigh? Respek.

[Chan93lx50]

Just a heads up, but Meta tags are obsolete. I know Google and Yahoo do not use them anymore actually I think there is only like one or two search engines that actually use them. I can't even think of the search engines names so tell you how important the Meta tag is

[penguinz]

Meta tags are not obsolete. Yahoo, Lycos, and Google are the exception to this. AOL, HotBot, MSN and Altavista still use metatags.

Metatags also do much more than just provide keywords.

[BigRedChief]

Google is the king kong of search engines and you can't fool it but you can change it a little to make yourself look better bu indexing your site with other sites (get a bunch of links to other sites on your site and have them put your link on their site). But the best google trick I know is the header on the page that IE sees.

In this example from this page:
this wont show because of the coding on this site. You need to rightclick on the page>chose view source to see the code. in the line near the top (the title) you change it to what you want like.
<title>ChiefsPlanet - Edit this post</title


You would go in and change it to reflect the keywords that will attract your audience that you want like:
<title>ChiefsPlanet - Beer, Brauts and Broads</title


PM me if you want to.

[penguinz]

Google is the king kong of search engines and you can't fool it but you can change it a little to make yourself look better bu indexing your site with other sites (get a bunch of links to other sites on your site and have them put your link on their site).
Just make suere you don;t register your sites with any "link farms". If you do it will lower your ranking.

[BigRedChief]

Meta tags are not obsolete. Yahoo, Lycos, and Google are the exception to this. AOL, HotBot, MSN and Altavista still use metatags.

Metatags also do much more than just provide keywords.

I can't give you an example because the bb software doesn't allow it.

[teedubya]

you can BigRedCHief



<html> blah blah blah

[penguinz]

I can't give you an example because the bb software doesn't allow it.From you previous post it looks like this is what you wanted to include in it...

<title>ChiefsPlanet - Edit this post</title


You would go in and change it to reflect the keywords that will attract your audience that you want like:
<title>ChiefsPlanet - Beer, Brauts and Broads</title

Yes the search engines do look at teh title tag but that is not the key parts that the spiders look at.

Here is an example of the meta tags at LinuxQuestions.org (http://www.linuxquestions.org)

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta name="keywords" content="Linux,how to,tutorial,operating system,linux,red hat,mandrake,security,help,installation,question,forum,chat">
<meta name="description" content="LinuxQuestions.org offers a free, friendly and active Linux Community. We have forums, quizzes, reviews, tutorials, links and much more. Want to learn Linux? Want to help others learn Linux? LinuxQuestions.org">


These are ones that the search engines will key on.

[penguinz]

you can BigRedCHief



<html> blah blah blah

you can not use html tags with the code /code BBTags. It will still execute it as html. You have to use the php /php BBtags.

[JakeT]

newsflash -- google will penalize you if you put "invisible" text on your pages

http://www.googleguide.com/print/website_development.pdf

[Bob Dole]

Here's some of what Bob Dole has been told. In all honesty, Bob Dole hasn't taken the time to proactively implement any of this, since Bob Dole is lazy as hell and isn't going to make any damned money off the thing anyway.

Initial advice: stay away from 3rd party apps promising to place you on search engines. All the major search engines hate them and will essentially blacklist your site.

Here's a lengthy email Bob Dole got from a local design and hosting guy regarding the issue:

First off this a link that a friend of mine wrote on how to make your website successful http://www.purephotoshop.com/article/68

Now as far as getting your site on the search engines, it is not all about the Meta Tags.. In fact Google does not read off meta tags. Google is mostly content based.

The better and more content you have, the more the indexers (robots) will pick up. The robots crawl on your website BUT ONLY if they have permission to as long as you do not have a robot.txt script saying stay the hell out of my website your ok.

Googlebot is Google's web crawling robot, which finds and retrieves pages on the web and hands them off to the Google indexer. It's easy to imagine Googlebot as a little spider scurrying across the strands of cyberspace, but in reality Googlebot doesn't traverse the web at all. It functions much like your web browser, by sending a request to a web server for a web page, downloading the entire page, then handing it off to Google's indexer.

Googlebot consists of many computers requesting and fetching pages much more quickly than you can with your web browser. In fact, Googlebot can request thousands of different pages simultaneously. To avoid overwhelming web servers, or crowding out requests from human users, Googlebot deliberately makes requests of each individual web server more slowly than it's capable of doing.

Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web

Basically make sure your site isn’t overloaded with graphics, keep your content professional and easy for the spiders/robots to understand so they can take it and turn it into a nice description and categorize your website. Second make sure you submit your site to the search engines.. Otherwise it will take 1 month to 4 months for the robots to find your site manually.(that goes for all search engines now just google)

Unfortunately, spammers figured out how to create automated bots that bombarded the add URL form with millions of URLs pointing to commercial propaganda. Google rejects those URLs submitted through its add URL form that it suspects are trying to deceive users by employing tactics such as including hidden text or links on a page, stuffing a page with irrelevant words, cloaking (aka bait and switch), using sneaky redirects, creating doorways, domains, or sub-domains with substantially similar content, sending automated queries to Google, and linking to bad neighbors.

When Googlebot fetches a page, it culls all the links appearing on the page and adds them to a queue for subsequent crawling. Googlebot tends to encounter little spam because most web authors link only to what they believe are high-quality pages. By harvesting links from every page it encounters, Googlebot can quickly build a list of links that can cover broad reaches of the web. This technique, known as deep crawling, also allows Googlebot to probe deep within individual sites. Because of their massive scale, deep crawls can reach almost every page in the web. Because the web is vast, this can take some time, so some pages may be crawled only once a month.

Although its function is simple, Googlebot must be programmed to handle several challenges. First, since Googlebot sends out simultaneous requests for thousands of pages, the queue of "visit soon" URLs must be constantly examined and compared with URLs already in Google's index. Duplicates in the queue must be eliminated to prevent Googlebot from fetching the same page again. Googlebot must determine how often to revisit a page. On the one hand, it's a waste of resources to re-index an unchanged page. On the other hand, Google wants to re-index changed pages to deliver up-to-date results.

To keep the index current, Google continuously recrawls popular frequently changing web pages at a rate roughly proportional to how often the pages change. Such crawls keep an index current and are known as fresh crawls. Newspaper pages are downloaded daily, pages with stock quotes are downloaded much more frequently. Of course, fresh crawls return fewer pages than the deep crawl. The combination of the two types of crawls allows Google to both make efficient use of its resources and keep its index reasonably current.

Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google's index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

To improve search performance, Google ignores (doesn't index) common words called stop words (such as the, is, on, or, of, how, why, as well as certain single digits and single letters). Stop words are so common that they do little to narrow a search, and therefore they can safely be discarded. The indexer also ignores some punctuation and multiple spaces, as well as converting all letters to lowercase, to improve Google's performance.

Below is an example of a meta tag from my site.. some search engines do love meta tags.. make sure you limit your meta tags to 20 keywords and a nice clean description.
[code]
can provide code if needed
Carl Prewitt Jr.
Slashing Designs

[|Zach|]

Thanks for your help folks. I appreciate it.

[stanleychief]

I think it would be cool to be able to make my website a little bit more friendly to the search engines. I know a lot of it has to do with META TAGS. Could someone explain it a little better though? Is there a service that would do a good job? I would be willing to spend a little money I guess but it seems that there are some good ways to do without anyhting like that. Techies? Web Gurus? Bestow your knowlege upon me!
Here's a site that looked good.

http://www.web-page-optimization.com/google.html

It currently has the #1 spot when doing a search for 'optimizing for google', so I think they're doing something right ;)

Also http://www.seoinc.com is a fairly respectable company, although it's pretty much pay only. We used them once for a large corporation's website in Wichita and they did indeed get us at #1 on Yahoo and Astalavista (several years before Google) Forgot how much they charged, but it wasn't cheap.

Just look for articles online, using a search engine. I mean you really can't go wrong if you locate an article on search engine optimization by using a search engine, can you?