OPTIMIZATION AND SEARCH ENGINE LISTING PLACEMENT - close when done

I will be updating this page as new information is found.

After reading about 1000 articles about search engines I have concluded the following ( which has totally changed in the last 6 months and still changing ) plus many of the search engines have merged.  The below facts I do not expect to change anytime soon.

Meta tags can only be seen if you click on "view" then select "view source" at the top of your browser screen, these tags are used by some but not by all search engines. They "used" to be exclusive but now it is more important to have descriptive page titles, as many different pages as you can, and as much text on the page as you can. Photo file names are important as well as "alternate text titles" can can be attached to all images.

1) they now penalize you for NOT having text in the page matching your keywords located in the meta tag hidden section of your web page - I suggest to now remove this section

2) "page title" that you will see at the top of the screen describing the page, these are the things that are displayed in the search engine return descriptions and should describe the contents of the page - this and other sections replaces the need for a keywords meta tag.

3) "description meta tag" this is the same as the page title but is not seen, only to search engine spiders.

4) they are penalizing the use of automatic submittal programs like I was using, and no longer use, you can do it yourself and I suggest NOT MORE than once a month

5) you can get up to the minute information about search engines at http://searchenginewatch.com/

more detailed information found at bottom of the page

just click on the "underlined text" to open new page

http://www.google.com.au/addurl.html

on the above you will "see" the enter screen word to prevent automatic program submittals

http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request

on the above you have to have a yahoo account which is free, also yahoo is used by lycos and altavista and others  NOTE: yahoo's server is flaky you might have to try the link several times to get in.

http://www.dmoz.org/add.html

you will need to pick a "category" many isp's are using this including AOL and many others

http://www.lycos.com/sitemap.asp

same

http://www.jayde.com/

click on submit your site at the top - pick a category
 

you can also pay a minimal fee to have your site listed immediately in several search engines

http://www.entireweb.com/express_inclusion/

https://secure.ah-ha.com/guaranteed_inclusion/teaser.aspx?network=WebCrawler

 

you can also do "pay per click" advertising - do so at your own risk as you could have a $1,000/mo bill with all kinds of visitors but NO ORDERS.

OTHER SOURCES

Microsoft Small Business article about search engine optimization click here

DETAILS

Most Internet users find information in one of the following ways:

1. Familiarity
They know, or guess your Internet address and go straight there or they type your business name into a search engine.

2. Searching
They have some idea of what they're looking for and search for it by keyword or phrase. Ensuring you appear in the first 30 results of the major search engines is probably the most effective way to capture these potential customers

How does your site get into these search engines?

To get listed in any of the major search engines, your first need to submit your site.

Many search engines use programs commonly called "robots", "web crawlers" or "spiders". These are simply software applications that trawl the Internet trying to find as many web pages as possible. The text from these pages is then copied and stored as database entries on very powerful servers. It is these text entries that are searched when a potential customer performs a key word search.

When the search is performed against the database, entries that contain all the user's key words score more highly than those that don't. The search engine will then rank them using their particular scoring method.

Fancy menus
JavaScript is often used in menu, on buttons and on other elements to create links to other pages and sites. While these menus and buttons may look great, save space in your layout and even enhance your site, a user visiting your site with an old browser or a browser with no JavaScript support will be totally lost.

Another issue, often overlooked, is the fact that web robots used by many search engines also do not follow links that rely on JavaScript. This may prevent your site from being indexed properly. The solution to this problem is to provide an alternative way to navigate your site which does not rely on JavaScript, or to create a menu that uses a combination of HTML and JavaScript to ensure compatibility.

UPDATE CONTENT
Every one of the search engines, especially Google, rank pages by themes. A theme is basically a collection of pages, all dealing with the same topic. The more pages you have that are on the same topic, with relevant content that is updated regularly, the higher your ranking will jump.

HIGHER PLACEMENT IN SEARCH ENGINES
Link popularity is a main requirement to get high rankings on major search engines.

This is how Google and other major search engines works. If you don't have link popularity your pages will never be indexed and you will never get high rankings.

You must have link popularity (other sites linking to your site). And if you want to specifically get high rankings on Google, the other sites/pages that links to your site must be listed on Google.

In order to get high rankings on major search engines, your site must have links from other sites."

Link popularity (total number of links from other sites to your site) is one of the most important factors that major search engines use to rank pages. It's not only the number of links but also the "quality" of those links that is important. If your site does not have link popularity you might never get high rankings.


JUST CLOSE PAGE WHEN DONE