General Search Engine Tips

• Have text on your home page: Search engines index the text read, so if your page has no text, you have little chance of being pulled up in a search.
• Have text high on your page, keeping keywords near the top so engines can easily read them.
• An introductory paragraph or two containng a mission statement woul dhelp the spiders in arriving at a better abstract of your site.
• Make sure you have good keywords. Focus on a few and put them within your title and near the top of your webpage.
• When selecting keywords, try to be open-minded, keeping in mind that not all people think the same way you do. For this reason, you should try to include a broad range of words pertaining to your site. In addition, sometimes even misspelling a commonly misspelled word can increase hits to your site, because many people are not aware of the correct spelling.
• Make sure your description of your site is complete and relevant.
• If possible, try to avoid frames. If you do have them, be sure to provide a way for users to enter frame-free.
• Avoid symbols in your URLs. Many search engines will not accept them.
• Keep in mind that each search engine has different methods of deciding what criteria is best for their engines. Therefore, it is a good idea to learn as much as you can about specific engines so that you can target them.
• Meta tags are useful, but are currently only used with Infoseek, AltaVista, Lycos and HotBot.
• All search engines have a waiting period before listing a page, from a few minutes to a few weeks. The only exception is Infoseek, which lists instantly.
• Submitting your site to a search engine more than once is not a good idea because it drops your ranking down lower than what it would normally be.
• Search engines cant read images so using the ALT tag to describe your images increases your chances of getting more hits on the search engine.

Specific Engine Information

Checking Where Your Page is Listed