Gather ‘round......

Web site promotion is a never ending job. The creative part of developing your initial site is over... now you have to draw attention to yourself. Simply building a site and putting it on the web is not enough. You must now learn the art of promotion.

SEARCH ENGINES AND SITE CONTENT

     Anyone who has ever conducted a search on the web has probably wondered just what makes one site appear in a higher priority than another. Search engines are one of the most efficient means of drawing traffic to your site (assuming that you've already tackled the issue of "content"). They are also one of the hardest to figure out! Indexing criteria and search procedures are constantly changing and you have to stay ahead of the game if you want your site to fare well with the competition. You can use search engine site utilities like Web Position Gold (discussed in the second part of this article) to optimize your pages and prepare them for submission to the leading indexes. While many search engines index pages differently, there are a few things you can do to help your site break out from the crowd.

     First, review each page of your site for "site identifiers". When a search engine indexes your page, one of the first things it does is examine the URL, site title, and the first 200 words or so for "key words". Your site name should be somewhere in one of those three items (preferably in all of them). Web sites that have a flashy graphic title without a normal text based title reference are losing out. Search engine "spiders" (automated programs that visit a page and automatically break down the content into usable criteria for indexing into the search database) usually cannot recognize text embedded in the graphic image. The use of ALT tags with your graphic images may help some but they are not a "cure all" solution.

     Second, examine the key words present in your web pages. As was previously mentioned, the first 200 words hold the most weight. If your site provides custom graphic design services for instance... look over the text for key words like; graphics, image, picture, JPEG, GIF, photograph, or other related descriptive text. While you will not want to load up the text at the expense of losing the meaning of what you've written, you should examine your content to see what kind of key words might show up in a search index. When in doubt, do a search of similar web sites then pick the top 5-10 sites returned by the search engine and examine what key words are evident in their designs. This is a good indicator of how a search engine prioritizes indexed content. Meta tags are yet another indexing tool mentioned earlier in these tutorials. You can use descriptive text and key words in the header of your HTML source (take a look at the source code for any of these pages). These tags are increasingly important and offer an easy way of ensuring that descriptions of your site show up as you intended in search query results (the meta tag for "description" provides the brief clip of text you see on a search engine listing. If the tag is not available, the engine indexes the first 200 words of text instead).

     One effective method of addressing the many possible keywords that may be used in defining your site is to create "doorway" pages. A doorway page is an introductory page with a tailored page title, description, text content, and keyword list designed to rank higher in a search engine for a specific query key word. For instance, a web site for a "Chucky Cheese" franchise restaurant could have 3 pages that "point" to the main menu page. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this reference... the franchise is a child’s pizza restaurant with animated costumed characters, games, and activities for young children. Chuckie, the host... is a large "rodent" (guy in a mouse costume).

     Back to the doorway pages... in our example, one page could be tailored to the terms children, games, and fun and be called "children.html". Another may cover the terms restaurant and pizza, and be called "pizza.html". Yet another doorway page might have keywords and descriptions that address dining, family fun, and parties with a file name of "family.html". You can see in the example to the right that each doorway page will still lead to the same web site while allowing the designer to have multiple "index" pages optimized for specific search criteria. While some search engines may penalize you for using too many doorways (always check the engine's listing criteria before submitting a site), most will allow you to submit multiple URL's for this purpose as long as the resulting pages truly help a searcher find the content they are looking for (a doorway page loaded with child specific terminology that leads to a pornographic web site would be an example of abuse and would most likely be quickly banned from any future listings). When used properly, the result is better coverage of all potential key words that a web viewer may enter to find your site.

     Finally, whether you believe it or not, search engine ranking is largely a popularity contest! What this means is that as your site is indexed, the engine will look for external links that point back to your web site. The more links back to you... the more "popular" your site is... and the higher you climb in the pecking order. Unsure of how many links point to your site? just enter the following string in the search text box on any search engine:
 +url:cimserv.com (obviously substituting your own domain name... you can add a / and a specific page (+url:cimserv.com/index.html for instance if you want to check how a single page is fairing as well). Try these tips out on the top ten search engines for starters. For some more enlightening information and tips on all the major search engines, visit the Search Engine Watch site, a great resource of information! Now that you understand the importance of these links, we'll discuss methods for establishing them in the second half of this tutorial.

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