WebStop's Internet Advertising Strategy
Promotion of your site must begin in the planning stages, not after it is completed. 80% or more of your visitors will probably find your site by using the major search engines. Obviously, it's important to make your site easy to find and to place as high as possible in the search results ranking. You can submit your site on your own, but after you see how much labor it takes, we're sure you will opt for WebStop's submission services. It's simple, inexpensive, and worth every dime to reach your target audience. This is just a peek at what goes on "Behind the Scenes" on the Internet Search Engines. Print it. It may come in handy.
Here's our Search Engine "secrets".
1) Include keyword(s) in your URL ( your URL is your web address- example-http://www.yourname.com)
( It helps if you have you own domain name.WebStop provides this service.) Try to choose one that includes a descriptive word relevant to your content. If you're selling books you'll get more hits if your page URL is
http://www.yourname.com/books.html than if it's http://www.yourname.com/next.html
When we design your site, we utilize this and other tools to make it easier for you to market your website.
2) Put keywords in your title.
If the title of your homepage is something like "Welcome to XYZ", you're wasting valuable web promotion space. If you have any specific titles, please let us know in advance of creating your site. You're title should be descriptive enough so it stands on its own; some search engines only return the title in search results. Many of the major search engines seem to rank sites higher based on relevant keywords in the title.
3)Use meta tags in your header for description and keywords in the HTML code. META NAME="description" CONTENT="your description" META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="your keywords" When you use WebStop, we build them for you based on the information you provide.
4)Include keywords and phrases at the top of your page. Any Catch phrases or slogans used by your company would go here.
5)Include keywords and phrases and/or repeat your description in comment tags. These are descriptions that are in the code that makes up the backbone of your pages. We will make the best effort to place as much of the content you ask for on the page visible to the customer, as well as behind the scenes in the code, so the search engines will recognize you as relevant to the customers search criteria.
6) Submit each major page of your site to the search engines. If you submit only your main page the spiders and robots may only index your site one level down and it may take weeks. For quicker indexing, submit each major page. WebStop will submit your page to the search engines for a fee, per page. This is a long and tedious process, if done correctly, and there is no sure way to automate the process as of yet.
7) Submit multiple bridge pages or "magnet pages". These are pages designed to draw traffic and should be loaded with your most important keywords. Some instances would include a greeting page or any "link through" pages in your matrix.
8) Change the title on your page and submit it again on a regular basis. WebStop can do this for you on a regular basis, provided you request the title in advance.
9) Include keywords in your "alt" tags. "Alt " Tags are placed when hyperlinks are added to your site. If you request a link from one page to another, you must specify the alt tags to go with them before the page is designed.
10) Break up your content into multiple short pages. Some search engines rate the page based on density of relevant words. A short page with many relevant keywords will rank higher than a longer page with the same number of keywords.
The Major Search Engines
WebStop has contacted the top eight search engines to find out their suggestions to maximize your site ranking. While each site does some things a little differently, there are also many similarities. For example, Infoseek, AltaVista , HotBot and WebCrawler recognize META tags for description and keywords. The following information was obtained on January 28,1998 from the sites listed below.
AltaVista
AltaVista uses a ranking algorithm to determine the order in which matching documents are returned on the results page. Each document gets a grade based on:
*how many of the search terms it contains
*where the words are in the document and
*how close to each other they are.
Repeating a word over and over in a Web page, known as"spamming," has only a negative effect on a site's ranking. As soon as it is discovered by software programmed specifically to detect spamming, the offending site is prevented from appearing in the AltaVista index.
Basically, they index all the HTML information on a page:All text, ALT text for images, links (hrefs and images),anchors, title, description and keyword META tags, applet and ActiveX object names, the page's URL, its host name(www.foo.com) and its domain name (com).
How do I control what is indexed? (looked at by the search engines)
You can control what is indexed by effectively using META tags for keywords and descriptions. You can specify these META tags to us and we will place as many of them on the page as is allowed. Please place them in order of relevance before submitting them to WebStop.
By simply adding a few invisible keywords, you can control the paragraph of text that is included on the result page along with the reference to your URL.
How are titles generated? Titles are generated from the title tag. If empty, the result is titled "No Title". You must specify a title for each page before design is completed, or WebStop will choose the most applicable to the site in our opinion. (Possibly a good idea if you're stumped!)
How are summaries generated? Summaries are generated from the first few lines of text and cleaned up a bit to look better. If the description META tag is present, it is used instead.
Excite
When you have WebStop design or redesign your site, let us know the search queries you want people to use to find it. Then we create a site that will be responsive to those queries. Our design theory is simple: Place less related topics in subsidiary pages.
If you're advertising your Hawaiian Bed and Breakfast, don't use the homepage to emphasize the way the ocean looks from a bedroom window. Instead, emphasize bed, breakfast, Hawaii, and weeklong getaways.
What is a relevance rating? Excite lists search results using a scored relevance rating -- the higher the percentage, the more confident they will be that the site listed matches your search query. The rating is generated by an algorithmic equation, which measures the site against the concept described in your query.
The search results page lists the title, URL (http://www.yoursitename.com), and a brief summary of each site. To the left of each title is the relevance rating (a percentage), which will help guide your customer to the information most closely matching their query.
How can I raise the relevance rating of my site? To improve the relevance rating of your site for a particular query, you will probably need to change the content on the home page. This will require major maintenance: Total deletion and re-construction of your home page. This will cost you, but if you feel that your marketing is not going to be successful in any other way, it is a good tool to use. Kind of like a "facelift" to attract new customers or help old ones to notice you better. "You can drive past the same store in your car every day and not notice it, but if the owner puts a different color paint on it, you can't help but wander inside to see what else has changed."
Hot Bot
Currently HotBot looks first to the description meta tag for the summary. If there's no such tag, HotBot uses the first few hundred characters of your visible text for the abstract. Note that HotBot will take some time to detect and index these changes. You can request a quicker update by adding the URL of the changed page to HotBot.
How does HotBot rank my search results? Each document that matches the requirements of a search is assigned a score. HotBot considers a number of things when assigning these scores.
Word frequency in document - In general, the more often a query word occurs in the document, the higher the score. However, the obscurity of the word also has an impact. Common words like "the" contribute less to the score than rare and distinctive words like "tiki."
Search words in title - Documents that use your search terms in the title will be ranked significantly higher than documents that contain the search term only in the text. Be specific when you choose a title.
Search words in keywords - Documents that use your search terms in the keywords META tag will be weighted higher than those that have your words in the text, but not as high as those that have your words in the title.
Document length - A short document that repeats your search words frequently will be ranked higher than a long document that repeats the words just as frequently.
Spoofing - Some people like to make documents that maliciously "spoof" search engines into returning documents that are irrelevant to the search at hand or that rank higher than they should. They may do this by duplicating words thousands of times in comments or keywords, or by including large numbers of "invisible" words in a tiny font or in the same color as the background of the document. If HotBot recognizes a common spoofing technique it will rank that document lower. Spoofing also lowers a document's ranking in HotBot by making the document longer. The formula HotBot uses to rank documents is pretty cool, and most people think it's useful, but the HotBot engineers are constantly working to improve the formula even more.
Infoseek
Use a highly descriptive title, include a META tag description (200 characters), and create META tag keywords that contain comma-separated phrases (1000 characters).Use an assortment of synonyms that accurately describe your site, but don't try to boost the site's relevance by repeating keywords. The overuse and repetition of keywords may result in a lower relevancy score and possible omission from Infoseek's index. WebStop has found that Infoseek is one of the "Better" search engines to use and provides a clearer more concise listing of URL's than most.
Lycos
You may submit more than one URL from your site as long as the URLs represent distinct WebPages. Multiple pages that contain the same content will not be added. The Lycos spider will try to travel through links contained in the WebPages you submit. A good rule of thumb is to count on the spider traveling down one level from the page you submit. Please, do not submit WebPages with these symbols in the URL: ampersand (&), percent sign (%),equals sign (=), dollar sign ($) or question mark (?). Their spider does not recognize them.
Lycos keeps track of every word on each page in the freshest catalog on the Web. That's a lot of information, so you can improve your search results by being specific. For example, if you're thinking of buying a new computer and looking for suggestions, you'll likely get more than you bargained for if you simply type the word "computer" into the search box and click the "Go Get It" button.
Northern Light
They index every word of each Web page, and every page of every Web site. There are other search engines that only index a small portion of each Web page or which index only a sample of the pages on every Web site.
Open Text
They order their results based on the number of times that the term searched for occurs on the page as well as where it appears. For example, if the term appears once in the URL, the page is ranked higher than one that has the term appearing once in the body of the document.
WebCrawler
WebCrawler indexes every word on your page up to 1MB of text. The keywords under which your page will be found in a WebCrawler search are thus the words on your page, and nothing else -- you don't need to submit keywords or categories along with your URL.
We can't guarantee that a particular site will come up at the top or close to the top of their results list for a given search. There are, however, ways in which you can ensure that your site gets indexed as it deserves:
1.Use a title uniquely descriptive of your page or site. SinceWebCrawler's indexing/relevance algorithm gives slightly more weight to titles than to body text pages with titles containing dead-weight words like "Homepage" or "Home Page on the WWW" don't often get easily found.
2.Make sure that the main page of the site describes to the fullest extent possible what the site's about. It doesn't have to be over-long and exhaustive, but as much text with the important words in it as you can possibly have without sacrificing the design/layout of the site will help on the indexing front.
Titles
WebCrawler displays the pages in its search results according to the way these pages' titles are specified in their HTML source files. When there is no title specified for a given page when WebCrawler indexes it, WebCrawler will list the URL of the document in lieu of the missing title.
Once your page has a title or once you've changed its title, please submit or resubmit your URL to WebCrawler and they'll index / reined your page during one of their next indexing runs in order to update their listings to reflect the new title of your page.
If you submit your site yourself, or have WebStop do it for you, marketing your site and getting full advantage of your Internet space requires the placement of your domain name and URL in ALL of your companies advertisements, business cards, letterheads, forms and any other printed and or electronic media associated with you. This will maximize the ability of your site to inform people of what you are all about.
Not everyone has a computer, granted, but word of mouth advertising is the BEST form to date, and if someone tells someone else about your company , and knows that you advertise on the web, and if they can recall your catchy little URL or domain name, they can relay that to other potential customers that WILL check you out on the web. If your "catchy little name" is given to them wrong, proper placement of META tags and Keywords in your script will provide a leg up on the competition in the vying for position in the Internet Marketing world. WebStop will provide you with the ability to reach an ever-increasing number of potential customers, not to mention the added "prestige" that a web presence affords you.
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