Most search engines allow you to precisely control how and what parts of your site are indexed by placing a "robots.txt" file on your site, as described in the Mini tutorial Here.

• en - English
• de - German
• es - Spanish
• fr - French

Before we go any further, you should know a few general things about search engines, and keep them in mind while designing a website.

First of all, no matter how well you prepare your Meta tags, they are not a magic solution to getting your website high in any listings. Not all engines will even look at your metas; some only look at the text content of your site, some look at both the metas and the textual content. The type of engines that use your metas to determine your listing are called "crawlers". An apt example is WebCrawler. Others, such as Yahoo, look for the textual content of your pages to determine your ranking.

The above should give you a pretty good idea of what meta tags will do, but we should examine a few of them in a little more detail. Let's start with this one:

When your site is listed on most search engines, your description will go right below the name of your site. Needless to say, the more eye-catching and descriptive you can make this, the better. Don't try to cram too much information into this area, however; the engine will usually only allow from one to four lines of text for your description, and if you make it too long, the end will be cut off from anyone's view. Your best bet is to make it short and to the point and as clear to the viewer as possible.

Keywords

And now about keywords, the words the search engine will use to determine the relevancy of your site:

Generally, crawler search engines will determine your site's listing by the keywords it finds in this tag. How many keywords? It all depends on the particular engine, and there are a lot of them.

As a general rule, keep the number of keywords down to 25 to 35. You may have heard that using one particular word several times will help your ranking, but forget the idea. This was a trick that worked for a very short time and if used, may possibly get your sight discarded. Search engines have gotten pretty sophisticated lately and if you try any scams at all you may have problems.

The best bet is to use as many non-repetitive keywords as possible, but be honest about it. Using well known names such as "Microsoft" in your keyword list will more than likely get your site dropped from consideration, unless several viable and relevant links are found in the page.

Don't use words like "ice cream"- use "ice,cream" instead. Don't put any spaces either before or after the comma, either: remember that search engine bots are written by applicaton programmers and a space, to them and to a computer's way of thinking, is a part of your word. In other words, "ice ", with the space behind it, will not get found by anyone who types in "ice" as their search word, whether or not they type in a space themselves.

You don't have to use a term like "orange sherbet" in your keywords, either. In order for that to generate a hit, the searcher would have to type in the exact phrase. If you list "orange,sherbet" then you will get found whether the searcher uses both words or only one- thereby increasing your odds. By the same token, don't list "popsicles" because anyone who searches for "popsicle" will not find you. Use the base of the word and you will get a hit. Any search looking for "grape popsicles" will find your keyword "popsicle".

Frames and Search Engines

If you use frames, you will need to do not a little bit of research on successfully listing with search engines. Most engines have a pretty hard time with frames; they either can't find pages within the site, or visitors will get sent to the site without the proper frame context having been established. In other words, they may well end up in the main window of your site, and if your navigation bar is in the left or top frame, they will have no navigation links. Needles to say, they won't bookmark you or make a return visit.

Almost all search engine spiders will only see the master page, i.e. the invisible part of your frameset. Like older browsers, they are not set up to discern the frame layout. (Don't forget: search engine bots are not browsers.) Consequently, only the information in the mater document is referenced and logged, as if the rest of your site were not even there.

The only information they will pick up is the text between the NOFRAMEs tags, if you have them, and if you use these tags in your master document, the pages that are referred to in these tags will have to be on your site, because this is the next place the spider will search. If it finds no documents for a no-frames browser, you will be ignored.

This is, admittedly, a rather poor situation, but a fact nevertheless.

Any NoFrames information should be put right after your first FRAMESET tag, but never above the first tag.

One work-around is to put a link to your menu frame in the master frame document, and title it "Contents". This will help with some engines. And be sure that you have a page name inserted in your TITLE tags for each frameset.

You may have seen some very popular sites on the web that use frames, and may be saying to yourself, "If they can do it, then I surely can!"... but keep in mind, those sites are popular because they are already known. When your name is as popular as Popular Science or whatever, you won't have to worry about search engines either. Or, if you can afford to pay, you can be assured of a high search engine position regardless of how you program your site. But- if you are like most of us, you will have to do some lengthy research to make the most of a frames site, as far as search engine placement goes. Here's a link if you have the time to really get deeply into it:

The Robots Exclusion Protocol

Some of you may have a need to exclude certain documents on your site from the search engines. Using Meta tags for this purpose is a poor idea because they work with only a few engines. The best way to exclude a part of your site is by using the above protocol within a URL using "/robots.txt" in the top level of your server's domain document area. Since the purpose of these tutorials is not intended for for professionals, I mention this subject only to present this link to you where you can find the information you'll need if you have the necessity.

Tables, JavaScript and Search Engines

Briefly, before we wind this up, here are a couple of things you may want to know about tables and JavaScript as far as search engine listings go.

A few engines will not be able to dig information out of tables, especially nested tables. And text inside of JavaScripts or VBscripts will also be overlooked by most engines. This is not a significant thing, but developing a successful sight takes a lot of hard work and all the little things add up.

A few last points:

• Place your Meta Tags immediately after your TITLE tags in the HEAD section of your document.
• Beware of sites offering "Free" submission to 1001 search engines- it's usually a good way to get on 1001 spammers' lists. (SubmitIT is a safe bet.)
• Re-submit your site every 6 to 8 weeks, but not oftener or you may be excluded from some search engine databases.
...Some related links for you:

• META Dictionary
• Search Engine Watch
• HTML Reference Library
• Meta Generator (Freeware)


...And a few Search Engines to get you started:

• Web Crawler
• Web Direct
• Link Star
• Alta Vista
• Excite
• Web Magazine
• InfoSeek
• Lycos
Search.Com



That should get you off to a good start. Check back once in a while for updates. Thanks for dropping in....



[Printer Friendly Page]