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Search
Engines
With
over 80% of website traffic delivered by search engines and directories
these are the best methods of promoting your web site.
There
are only about 7 search engines worth paying attention to: Google,
Yahoo, MSN, AskJeeves, Lycos, AltaVista, and AOL. Together they
account for 97% of search engine traffic (same as in 2003).
Search
engine stats see below.
Billions
Of Textual Documents Indexed
Key
GG=Google , ATW=Alltheweb, INK=Inktomi, TMA=Teoma, AV=AltaVista.
The
amount of textual documents indexed by the search engines can
be seen above, with google having the largest index at 3.3 billion.
What
does this mean?
Lets
a an example search, suppose we operate a web site giving mortgage
advice to UK customers. If you goto google.com
and search for mortgages UK
you
will see google display results indicating it has indexed and
found Results 1 - 10 of about 3,850,000 (correct as of 15-10-2204)
This
means it has over 3.8 million pages indexed against the keywords
mortgages UK. All the top 10 sites you see in google will have
bean optimised for this search term. This is known as search
engine optimisation, or making your web site search engine
friendly.
In
order to make your web site search engine friendly there are several
simple thing you should do.
1.
Your Title tag should have your keywords in (the words you think
your visitors will type in)
2.
Meta Tags, you want to get a top ranking in search engines? No
problem! All you need to do is add a few magical "meta tags"
to your web pages, and you'll skyrocket to the top of the listings.
If
only it was that simple!
Yes
you can use meta tag some search engines still use them, but they
are not as important as they once were.
The
Meta Description Tag
The
text you want to be shown as your description (generally, 200
to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion
of this amount may be displayed).
The
Meta Keywords Tag
The
meta keywords tag allows you to provide additional text for crawler-based
search engines to index along with your body copy (text on your
web page). How does this help you?
For most major crawlers, it doesn't. That's because most crawlers
now ignore the tag.
But
if you wish to include the tag see HTML
Tags page
for
guidance on how to use these.
What
is the most important thing to get your web site to rank highly
in search engines?
The
sixty four thousand dollar question?
There
is no simple way of achieving this, but the best way is to provide
unique quality content and get other relevant websites
to link to your web site to not only provide quality traffic but
to also improve your link popularity.
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