interactive design 1 - med m/512 - fall 2005
Philip van Allen - v a n a l l e n @ a r t c e n t e r . e d u
room 228, wednesday 1:00pm-5:00pm
all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen
 
week 12b - budgeting, site promotion, web technologies

site promotion : 

overview

A very important job of the web developer is to ensure that a web site is well listed in the search engines. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) requires a series of steps to configure the web site as well as notifying the search engines of the existence of the site:

  • Configure:
    • Meta Tags
    • Home page title
    • Home page content
  • Initiate link agreements with other websites
  • Submit site to search engines and directory services

Special notes:

  • Keep in mind that search engines correlate all different aspects of the web site, so the meta tags should match up with each other, and match the page title and content.
  • Sites may take a long time to show up in search engines, so it's important to start the submission process early in the development process--e.g. when the preview page is posted.
  • The sites listed in these notes are not endorsed by me, and I make no claims about their efficacy--do your own research!
meta tags : 

The "keywords" and "description" meta tags in the HTML help search engines match up a web site with an appropriate search request. They are essential for good search engine listings. But note that Google ignores metatags.

Keywords Meta Tag
<META name="keywords" content="New York Times, international news, daily newspaper, national, politics, science, business, your money, AP breaking news, business technology, technology, Cybertimes, circuits, new york times, navigator, sports, weather, editorial, Op-Ed, arts and leisure, film, movie reviews, theater, stock quotes, arts, classified ads, automobiles, books, crossword puzzle, job market, help wanted, careers, real estate listings, travel, web glossary, new york region, Navigator, cybertimes, op-ed, job listings, forums, business connections, theatre reviews, auto classifieds, newspaper archives, travel forecasts, NY Yankees, Mets, Giants, Jets, boxing, pro football scores, major league baseball, college basketball, Knicks, Rangers, Islanders, college football, sports commentary, fashion and style, Hockey, tennis, major league soccer, global issues, associated press, regional news coverage, quick news, women¹s health, obituaries, stock quotes, charts, market indexes, sports update, politics, science, political news, science times">

Keywords or phrases are used by some search engines to match your site with a search request.

  • Include keywords or phrases of all subjects related to your site
  • Place a comma after every keyword or phrase (except for the last one)
  • You should use many applicable keywords for your web site. You can use up to 1000 characters (80-90 words) for the keywords in the tag.
  • Don't repeat keywords more that 4-6 times. Your site may be disqualified by search engines if you do (it is considered keyword spamming)
  • Only use keywords related directly to your web site. Search engines check the keywords against the content of your site and will disqualify sites that put fake keywords in their list.
  • Put your most important keyword or phrase first in the list, and place the rest of the keywords in order if importance.
  • Include the misspellings of commonly misspelled keywords in the list
  • Use upper case letters only for proper names

Description Meta Tag
<META name="description" content="The New York Times on the Web: Daily international, national and local news coverage from the newspaper, breaking news updates, technology news, sports, reviews, crosswords, classified ad listings.">

The description text is used by about half of the search engines to describe your site in the results section of a completed search.

  • The description should be a 1-2 sentence description of your web site with maximum of 250 characters (25-30 words)
  • Use as many of your important keywords in the description as possible, especially your primary keyword

 

  
title tag : 

The title tag serves to identify your site to the user, as well as to the search engines

  • The title can be up to 100 characters
  • It should include as many important keywords/key phrases as possible

 

  
home page content : 

The home page content is important because many search engines use this text to analyze the site and create appropriate match-ups with search requests.

  • Put your most important keyword phrases in larger text and make it bold. Use the <font size="+3">, or <h1> heading method to identify the headings in your page. Use the <b> tag to make it bold.
  • Include your important keywords in your content, and place these keywords in the upper part of the web page. The search engines check your keywords against your page content.
  • Limit the amount of content on the home page, and focus on your most important search words. Put the most important searchable content at the top of the page.
  • If your content is embedded in images, be sure you use ALT text for all images.
  • If your page is heavy in images, you should also include HTML text of your content. If you want to hide this text, there are a few techniques:
    • put the text in a layer, but put the layer off the page. E.g. the left/top coordinates are set to -500, -500. When you create the layer, be sure the actual HTML is near the top of the document because the search engines will pay more attention to it.
    • You can try to conceal the text, but some search engines will reject sites that make text the same color as the background or make the text size="1", especially both.

 

  
link exchanges : 

Many search engines (especially Google) determine the placement of a site based on how many other sites link to the site.

  • To increase the numbers of sites linking to your site, initiate link exchanges with other sites. These work by a mutual agreement where each site links to the other site.
  • Make sure any of your affiliated sites have links to the your new site. Often companies will create multiple sites related to a topic, and link between them to enhance their position.

If your site already exists, you can search for other sites that link to your site and see how well you are doing. In Google or AltaVista, use the "link:" prefix before your web address. For example:

link:www.company.com


  
internal links : 

It's important to have links within your site to your different pages. The text used in the links is also very important and should directly correspond to the key phrases you would like people to use to find these pages when searching.

 

 
search engine : 
submission : 
Search engines will may not find your site automatically or very quickly. To improve your listing among the search engines, you must submit your site to the search engines. There are several approaches to submitting sites:
  • Submit the site manually to each search engine using their free submission forms
  • Submit the site to a web directory
  • Pay the search engine to submit your site. The policies vary depending on the search engine, but this will at a minimum ensure that your site will show up sooner than the free submission. Some sites will list your site better if you pay them.
  • Pay a submission service to submit your site to many search engines. This saves you time, but opens you up to spam mail.
  • Hire a professional organization to manage your site search engine status
  • Buy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) software to automatically analyze and submit your site to many search engines.

 

  
manually submit : 

You can achieve some visibility in the search engines if you manually submit your site to key search engines. Unfortunately, most of the search engines now charge for any kind of submission. All the more reason to have links to your site on other websites so the search engines will pick your site automatically just by indexing the web.

 

  
web directories : 

There are two "search" engines that are actually human edited directories. The most famous of these is Yahoo! A new one is called the Open Directory Project.

 

  
paid submissions : 

These services submit your site to search engines.

 

  
pay per click : 

These services enable you to pay based on the number of click-throughs of your ads. They are usually based on search keyworks.

 

  
submission services : 

There are many, many services on the web for submitting your site to a large number of search engines. The quality of these varies, and some are actually just a scam to collect your email address for spam mailings.

Site Solutions also provides a useful set of site analysis services, including a review of the HTML for good usages of meta tags, title tag, and page content. These tools are at: www.sitesolutions.com/tools.asp

 

  
professional services : 

If your client requires the highest quality in search engine visibility, it may be best to hire a professional organization to assist in the marketing of the web site.

  • www.submitawebsite.com - Range of services from $500
  • MoreVisibility.com - Site analysis and search engine submission
  • www.websidestory.com - Service that provides in-depth analysis of web site traffic. Not exactly search engine related, but very important for high volume web sites that need to maximize their effectiveness.

 

  
seo software : 

Software packages that run on your PC are available that enable analyze & optimize your site, look for the best search terms to use, and look at how other sites have achieved high search rankings

  • For Windows - Web Position Gold - Software and services for site submission and optimization $149-$349
  • For Macintosh - OptiLink - Competative site analysis, link optimization, search terms, etc $149
  • For Macintosh - VSE Be Found - Sotware to submit sites to search engines, check ranking in search engines, etd. They offer at lite ($20) and pro version ($90)

 

  
other resources : 

 

 

  

all materials on this web site © copyright 2005, Philip van Allen

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