Forum Moderators: mack
Meta tags:
Ok so firstly I analyzed the metatags, which surprise surprise, there were none.
I quickly researched [inventory.overture.com...] for comon combinations of relevent words and compiled some keywords and description as follows. (I have added blah blah and such so as not to be seen as spamming the website by giving the name of my website. Hope this is ok)
html>
<head>
<title>blah blah</title>
<meta name="description" content="balh blah blah .">
<meta name="keywords" content=" blah blah blah">
<meta name="language" content="english">
<meta name="author" content="blah blah">
<meta name="copyright" content="blah blah">
<meta name="revisit-after" content="2 days">
<meta name="cache-control" content="no-cache">
<META HTTP-EQUIV="pragma" CONTENT="no-cache">
I uploaded this and quickly ran a analytics with ‘scrub the web’ which told me I had repeated a few keywords more then 3 times which would penalize my sites (is this true, you can only repeat keywords 3 times? what else will penalyse you?)
Google Site Map:
After reducing these keywords to 3 I compiled a xml sitemap for Google using a sitemap generator website.
I downloaded the result and uploaded it to the public folder and notified Google of its existence in the hope it will more quickly crawl my website and so I can view analytics on my website.
(can someone tell me what good, if any, this will do my website? Are there other search engines it will be worth while submitting site maps to?)
Yahoo Site Explorer;
I also added my website to yahoo Site explorer, though I will be damed if I know what good this will do
(if you happen to know please advise as I would be keen to make some use of this site, or know what it can do)
Site Inclusions:
After creating these site maps I submit to several essential search engines such as:
Google: [google.com...]
Yahoo: [search.yahoo.com...] (#*$!s charge what US$250 per inclusion what a joke. Is it worth the money to get listed?)
MSN: [submitit.bcentral.com...]
Alexa: [alexa.com...] (I don’t know if you would call this a submission, but they say it will crawl my site within 8 weeks. It also says that if you have the alexa toolbar (which I do), Alexa will know about your website)
Open Directory: [dmoz.org...] (though at the time of writing it appears to be down.)
Altavista: [altavista.com...] (basically this is one and the same as yahoo as far as I can see but they ask for extra dosh for paid inclusion. The cheek)
Web Wombat: [webwombat.com.au...] (as you can maybe tell by the name of the page, this is a Australian based search engine) Cost$40-65
Sensis: [sensis.com.au...] (again another Australian Search Engine owned by Telstra, i.e. probably pretty crap given how this company is run)
Exact Seek: [members.exactseek.com...] (requires membership)
Ok so there the few websites I have added my listing to. If you have any more you think would be worth while I would love to hear from you.
Ok so tomorrow I am stating up a links exchange with other relevant websites in my industry which should also increase the exposure of my website. If you can recommend any tactics for this I would like to know because I have know how detrimental it can be getting sandboxed by Google and such.
I look forward to hearing any advise the more professional webmasters can offer and I hope my experience helps other fellow newbie webmasters.
1. You do not need to submit a site to any search engines, and doing so is waste of time. If you have any incoming links, they'll find you and list you. If no links, a submission is unlikely to 'stick' - and certainly won't get useful rankings.
2. Meta tags need to be unique fr each PAGE. And you need to read up in more detail how and why to get them right. They matter.
In 99% of cases, you only need:
<title>blah blah</title>
<meta name="description" content="balh blah blah">
<meta name="keywords" content=" blah blah blah">
In all cases, these need to reflect the visible content of the PAGE. Read up on cache before making errors there!
3. In SEO terms, Alexa is a waste of space and a source of pointless one-upmanship. Ignore it. Unless you want to impress other webmasters.
[edited by: Quadrille at 3:10 pm (utc) on Sep. 19, 2006]
too many issues in one thread!
Oh, I don't know - I think we can handle it? Your three points summarise the key responses pretty well already.
Hi leonidas333,
I honestly would suggest you have a complete rethink about your whole approach to this project. Start with a blank sheet and read this post:-
[webmasterworld.com...]
It's a thread which gets referred to quite a lot around here, as it's an excellent basic summary on the important factors when using search engines as a marketing tool.
Once you've read that, if you have any specific questions that need to be addressed, fire away.
You're at the beginning of a very steep learning curve, but the nice part about that is you'll learn 90% of what you need to know in a very very short period of time.
TJ
In addition I would say that one of the most important things with SEO is to make the site CRAWLABLE for spider - ie., make it text-based, kick out all graphics-based navigation, flash and other rubbish, get alt-tags for pictures, etc. Look at the site with a text-only browser to see it like a spider.
Once it is spider friendly, focus on two aspects:
1.) Content. Content. Content. (90%)
2.) Links - good ones coming in and going out. (10%)
Your content is probably sorted in your case, so you can fiddle with the links.
for more info, immerse yourself in the libraries of WW.
Good luck,
W.
Your document should begin with a !DOCTYPE (this tells the browser what sort of HTML is in the file) followed by the <html> and <head> tags:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
.
For your page to actually be valid you MUST declare the character encoding (lets the browser know whether to use A to Z letters (Latin), or Chinese, Japanese, Thai, or Arabic script, or some other character set) used for the page, with something like:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
There are also other schemes such as UTF-8 and many others.
.
It is also a good idea to declare what human language the page is in, using:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="EN-GB">
The language and country codes come from ISO 4217 and ISO 3166. This is useful for online translation tools as well. Change the "en" and "gb" to whatever language and country you need.
.
You need a <title> element for the page:
<title> Your Title Here </title>
This is displayed at the top of the browser window, and stored as the name of the bookmark if someone bookmarks the page URL in their browser. Most importantly, it is the <title> tag that is indexed and displayed by search engines in the search results page (SERPs).
.
You need the meta description tag, as this is very important for search engines, and it is useful but not vital to have a meta keywords tag:
<meta name="Description" content=" Your Description Here. ">
<meta name="Keywords" content=" your, keyword, list, here ">
.
Most search engines do obey the robots meta tag. The default robots action is index, follow (index the page, follow all outbound links) so if you want something else (3 possibilities) then add the robots tag to the page in question. If you want to exclude whole directories then use the robots.txt file for this instead of marking every HTML file with the tag.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
.
The last parts of your header should have your links to external style sheets and external javascript files:
Use this if the stylesheet is for all browsers:
<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" src="/path/file.css">
.
Use this for style sheet that you want to hide from older browsers, as older browsers often crash on seeing CSS:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css">
<style type="text/css"> @import url(/path/file.css); </style>
.
Use this for the javascript:
<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript" src="/path/file.js"></script>
.
End the header with this:
</head>
<body>
and then continue with the body page code.
It is as simple as that.
.
Code within the page:
I use: <a href="somepage.html" title="some text here"></a> for links.
I use <img src="somefile.png" alt="some text"> for images.
Headings are done with <hx></hx> tags, properly used from <h1></h1> downwards.
