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- Secrets to Submitting to Search Engines
by Stacy Williams
In optimizing your web site for crawler-based search engines, it's important to place your search
terms (the words and phrases your target audience may type into a search engine to find your
site) in the places the engines consider important. Last time (please link to previous article) I
discussed how to select the ideal search terms for your site. Today I'll talk about what to do with
these terms.
It no longer works to stuff 50 search terms into the keyword meta tag on your home page and call
it a day. Search engines now look for "themes;" that is, they like to see one search term used in
multiple places on one web page. If you've got 10 key pages on your web site, select 10 search
terms and optimize each page for a different term. This way, you can target 10 terms, and each
of these key pages becomes a potential entry page for your visitors that click through from the
search engines.
Here are the nine places on a web page where the engines look for search terms. Not all of the
engines look at all nine, and they each weight the importance of each place differently. But if you
can use your search terms in as many places as possible, your bases should be covered. The first
three places listed below are by far the most important.
1. The visible HTML text, or copy, on the page. Repeat the search term a few times in the first
paragraph or two of copy.
2. The title tag, which appears in the blue bar at the top of the browser window. If you can use
your search term first, even better ("Organic dog food at the Pet Emporium"). If you don't think
people will search using your company's name, you may choose to not even include it in the title
tag.
3. The description meta tag, which is the description that the search engines display.
4. The keyword meta tag. Many search engines don't bother looking at this any more, since so
many people have abused it. Still, it can't hurt to put your search term here. Repeat it 3-7 times
without placing it twice in a row.
5. Heading tags (<H3> or <H4>) for headlines, instead of graphic headlines.
6. Alt tags, which are alternative text meant to describe the graphics on the page.
7. Comment tags, hidden in the page's code.
8. The page URL. Better to use www.petemporium.com/organic-dog-food.html than www.
petemporium.com/page1.html. Separate words with dashes or underscores.
9. Search engines look at the words within text links too, so ideally you'd use your search terms in
all the text links that point to a particular page. That is, instead of using "click here," you'd use
"click for more information about organic dog food." An easy place to do this is on the site map.
Confused? Take a look at my web site at www.prominentplacement.com. I've optimized every
page on the site for a different search term, using all nine places. You can even see the code
(including the tags) by going to View, then Source or Page Source on your browser's toolbar.
Before you're ready to submit to the search engines, you'll also need to look over the design and
technologies your site uses, to make sure there's nothing that will trip up those crawlers.
Unfortunately, at this time, crawlers can only read your code (which includes the HTML text visible
on the page). Again, they can't read any copy that's in graphic format. They also can't
understand most of the bells and whistles that many companies like to use, including Flash,
multimedia, streaming media, splash screens, frames, Java rollovers, drop-down menus, Adobe
Acrobat (pdf) files, or password-protected areas. When faced with these technologies, crawlers will
stop, back up, and go visit someone else's site instead of yours.
Another potential problem is dynamically generated content; that is, content that's generated on
the fly from a database. Specifically, the problem is with those long, complex URLs that have a "?"
or "%" in them. Today, Google claims they can crawl these types of pages, but they seem to be
the only search engine that's attempting to do so.
Finally, if you're optimizing more than just the home page for the search engines, you've got to
make sure their crawlers can find the other pages on your site by providing HTML text links for
them to follow. If you, like most people, want to use attractive graphic buttons (or Java rollovers
or a drop-down menu), that's fine - just put text links at the bottom of the page as well (that's
what I did on my site). Another solution is to make sure your site map has text links - you can
even submit the site map to the search engines and allow the crawlers to find every page that way.
Optimizing your site is the hard part, but fortunately, actually submitting it to the search engines is
fairly simple. Most search engines have a text link, usually at the bottom of the home page,
called "Submit A Site" or "Add URL." Click on it, fill out the brief form, and you're done. Some
search engines (America Online, MSN, Netscape) don't allow you to submit sites directly because
their database comes from another search engine or directory that they've partnered with. And
note that some charge for inclusion - look for a future article that evaluates the various paid
inclusion programs (such as those implemented at Inktomi and Alta Vista).
Track your efforts. Crawlers can take anywhere from seconds to months to visit your site and
index its contents. You can check your site host's server logs to see which engines have visited, or
if that's too technical, simply type "yourdomain.com" into the search engine to see if it's been
indexed yet. If it's been several weeks since you've submitted, feel free to resubmit. Next time,
I'll discuss submitting to directories such as Yahoo, which requires an entirely different approach.
