Reach For The (Search Engine) Sky!!!
By Niyi Adeoshun
It is common
knowledge now that in order to attract traffic to your website,
you need to make effective use of search engines. To do this,
you must know how search engines find and rank websites.
Search engines
use automatic programs called 'spider' -that follow links
- to surf the web, analyse page contents and build matrices
of frequently used words. they generally rank results from
queries based on the closeness of sets and frequency of words
in the indexed pages.
Page Preparation
Search engines
strongly weigh the information you put between the <title>
</title> tags. The right order of words and the right
message can, in fact, push you up a search
It is not necessary
to submit more than the top two or three pages, since it doesn't
speed up the process. Submitting alternative pages is only
insurance. In case the search engine has trouble reaching
one of the pages, you've covered yourself by giving it another
page from which to begin its crawl of your site.
Submitting multiple
page can be helpful if people are looking for specific content
on your site. Set up sub-sections and include the appropriate
keywords on the relevant pages. don't overload the meta tags
with broad topics
Frames and Search Engines
Contrary to what some "experts" say, using frames to construct
your website does not decrease your rankings. Just make sure
that your <frameset> page and the subframe pages have
proper title tags and meta tags (as described above). Now
the search engine can index the individual pages within your
site but they won't be in the normal frames. Instead, the
pages will stand alone. There are two ways to overcome this
problem:
- Include a "Home" link at
the bottom of all your pages
- Include this little JavaScript
solution (one of several) to the body of your pages
<BODY onLoad="if (parent.frames.length==0)
top.location='frameset page name.html';">
What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds
that it is not in a frame, it redirects the browser to the
proper frameset URL, whatever that might be.
Any "off-limit" files?
If you want to make certain areas of your site inaccessible
to spiders, you will need the robots.txt file. This is a special
file you can place on your webserver to restrict access by
some or all webcrawling robots to some or all of your site.
Mind you, you can only have a robots.txt file if you own your
own domain, because they are always located in the same place
on the server (so the robot can find them!). If you don't
have any restricted area on your site (like me) you don't
need a robots.txt file. Don't even put an empty robot.txt
file as some robots interpret a blank robots.txt file as meaning
"don't crawl any pages on this website."
To learn more about
robots, visit the Web Robots Pages. If you've
decided you need the robot.txt file but can't make one (yet),
the easy way of keeping spiders out of your documents is by
adding the meta tags below:
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="NOINDEX">
to prevent the document from being indexed and
<META NAME="ROBOTS"
CONTENT="NOFOLLOW">
to prevent the links in the document from being parsed by
the spider.
What Happens
Next?
If you carry out
a search (say about two weeks later) and find out that your
page(s) have not been indexed, check and make sure you are
not breaking any rules. For example, if your pages contain
long lists of words, they may be rejected. They call this
search engine spamming; using lists or the same words over
and over in your pages to gain higher ranking in search results.
Avoid search engine tricks; you will eventually be found out
and may be blacklisted. If it means removing the lists, or
modifying the pages do it, it will pay of in the long run.
Try to start your pages with some interesting facts that casually
include your main keywords.
About the author.... Niyi Adeoshun
is the administrator of http://www.nukanweb.com
and the editor of the Christian
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