Integrated Skills and Thoughts

I N T E G R A T E D

Web pages ought to be able to be found by a search engine. Search Engines , also called search spiders and robots, can't find you and catalog who / what / where you are if they can't read some things about you from your page's code. A good web page has the information presented for the search spider using META TAGS, and other presented information on the page. It costs more to program them in, but they are vital to make you easily found when someone does a search.

To do that, you have to take lots of "hits", lots of visitors. So, you need a good reason to draw them there. Then the internet, because it wants to be fast, will keep track better of where you are, and what you have on your site.

META NAME's : name / what / who / where for search robots - defined before the pages are built.

META NAME's : You should write down what you use to build your pages. Reuse those vital words to explain about you to the candidate viewer later.

There are others - but I'll save them until we are working with you ! Webmasters keep their secrets !

More about the description, keywords, robots and title tags.

* Description tag : the description META Tag is used by many search robots as the description text for your listing.

* The Description META Tag should contain five to fifteen words but not exceed 1000 characters.

* Be as descriptive as possible within these constraints. To increase your relevancy to the algorithm that determines your value, use your keywords, always ensuring that your description remains readable.

* Keywords tag : place the targeted phrase in the keywords tag.

* Add the plural form of the keyword, and also use the keyword in a phrase.

* Keep your keywords tag to eight words or less. Do not create long lists of keywords.

* Robots tag : the robots tag identifies if this page is an index this page, and also to index pages linked to this one.

* Always use the parameter = "index,follow" tag.

* Title tag : title tags are critical in search engine placement algorithms.

* The title tag should contain five to ten descriptive words and not exceed 200 characters. Within this tag, the targeted keyword should be used as the first word of the title.

* Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos , MSN , HotBot, InfoSeek and Web Crawler use the title tag as the text for the sites listing.

Begin the copy with a heading tag. Within this headline, use the targeted keyword or phrase.

* Plan to put between two hundred and five hundred words of copy on the portal page, as some search engines are imposing a spam penalty for pages with less than one hundred. Sprinkle the keyword or phrase liberally throughout the copy. Make sure the copy is coherent, relevant and compelling. Do not repeat your keywords over and over, strung in a long line.

* Avoid using words written in the same color as the background, or your page will be evaluated as spam by the search engine.

* In general, avoid background images and image maps for portal pages.

* Some search engines will also read comment tags. This is can improve relevance. And use complete sentences and a different sentence in each comment.

* Include two or three links to logical starting places within the site on the portal page, as a single link to your domain's home page would look like a spam marketing gimmick and trigger the search engines spam omission penalty.

* Avoid items like banners, counters, cgi, Java or JavaScript. Do NOT use the refresh tag, which could trigger the search engines spam omission penalty.

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