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Category: Search Engines

Search Engine Strategies

People have mentioned specific websites that allow you to further reasearch search engine strategies, but I would like to start a discussion here regarding search engines and the way to achieve good rankings. Specifically I would like to discuss Google and Alltheweb. Plus I would also like to start a discussion about the elements that help you to achieve good ranking for instance, Title tags, Meta tags, alt tags and so forth. Is there any interest out there to start a discussion of such things?

I haven't done much to get a number 1 ranking (search for torrin (http://www.google.com/search?q=torrin)) on Google (http://www.google.com). I added these 2 meta tags and that's about it.

<meta content="Torrin's personal web page." name="Description" />
<meta content="Torrin, TAJ" name="Keywords" />

I find it hard to believe that I'm listed above the island over in Scotland, Torrin Photography, Truck Insure by Torrin, the sports star named Torrin, and the cities named Torrington. If anybody has any ideas why, please let us in on it.

By the way, I'm not affiliated with any of the above named entities. My web page is http://www.torrin.net.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that your domain name is torrin.net.

Not sure if that is valid but may be the reason.

Just did a quick check on google and if you add anything like Island, or Sports or Photo it knocks you out of first place.

It's interesting to note that search engines often give higher rankings to those keywords that appear in the URL. In your case torrin.net has the main keyword (torrin). I also experience such a phenomenon with my website.

The title also carries a heavy weight when search engines use it. I've noticed specifically that Fast (Alltheweb) one of the more significat weightings happens with the title tag. With Google, it's not the most important, but tends to be one of the more important. When searching for torrin I've noticed that your <title> tag is just Torrin .NET that would tend to give you such a high result also for the specific keyword torrin.

The abbreviated task list:

1. Optimize Your Site
- Title tags - (keyword/phrase specific)
- File Names - (keyword/phrase specific - (keyword.html))
- Body Content - (3-6% keyword/phrase to total text ratio per page)
- Lots of Content/Themed Site - (Many pages about keyword/phrase)
- Meta Tags - (Not very important these days. Don't do too many and don't repeat words more than 5 or 6 times)
- Domain/Subdomain - (keyword/phrase specific)
- No dead links
- etc.

2. Get Linked
-Link with Quality - Find non-competitive sites within your keyword/phrase industry to link with.
-Link everywhere else - Link everywhere else. Don't use automated services (some can get you blacklisted).

3. Submitting Your Site
- Submit to DMOZ.org - find the BEST category for your site. VERY IMPORTANT
- Submit to Google.com - Submit only your homepage (80% of your traffic will come from Google)
- Submit to AlltheWeb.com - Submit only your homepage (You are really submitting to Fast Search)
- Consider submitting to Yahoo - Pay $299 annually if you want to get in
- Consider submitting to Inktomi - Inktomi serves to Excite, Hotbot, MSN, Looksmart and Overture ($49, if I remember correctly)
- That's it - You will ultimately find yourself in the 20 search engines that really matter. You can submit individually if you want, but don't pay to do it.
- Don't use submission services - (At least those that mass submit)

4. Wait
- while you wait, keep linking your site and updating your content.
- create more content pages and optimize them
- keep up with search engine trends
- you may need to resubmit after a few months if nothing happens

That's a start I guess.

BErickson -- I like what you have posted and that is definetely a good start to any search engine optimization. Most of it can be said with what you have put down in text. Maybe we could get more info as to what specifically we could do to optimize our sites for the search engines. I have done extensive research into this, and I believe that I am able to target quite effectively the things that I should to get good results.

Also, I would just like to mention a tool that helps with keyword selection: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/ works great to identify which keywords are being used and in terms of popularity.

That's the best task list I've seen, great! I didn' know about avoiding dead links in your site, and that seems important.

I would add that when getting linked...
-The link may content the keywords you want, and with anchor text tags.
-You can link all your sites between them but being careful not to do something that some search engines could see as a link farm, cause then you may be banned. See http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum12/386.htm
-Getting listed in Dmoz used to have a fast positive action. Now it's a bit slower due Google doesn't consither it as important as it used to be. But it is still a good place to be listed due to all the other links you get after some time (Dmoz is an open resource that many sites copy)

It's better that your pages content doesn't exceed 101k: http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/12177-1-15.htm

Havig a robot.txt is not strictly necessary but it could help you not to have errors on your logs, and could help you to protect some folders with "disallow". And Google Guy says it is better to have an "allow" if you want some folders to be spidered.

Can someone explain what is a robot.txt & how do I do it
thanks
gaddr

robots.txt is a file that tells spiders sent out from search engines which content they can index and what is allowed or disallowed. For instance in my robots.txt file I could allow every search engine except Google, or I could only allow google and disallow every other search engine. I could also restrict access to certain folders on my site for the spiders. Here is an example of a robots.txt file. This file is allowing all spiders () to index the site and disallowing them to index the cgi-bin directory.

User-agent:
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

Thanks for your help :)

Just thought I would add that you place the robots.txt in your home directory where you have your home page i.e. /var/www/html/