Business Builder - Gettind Found by the Search Engines

Melonbones' Business Builder

Getting Found by the Search Engines

META TAGS

If the search engines can't find your web site, chances are no one else will either. There are entire books and courses written on this subject alone, but here are the basics.

You must include META TAGS in your pages, especially your home page, to tell the search engines what your site is all about.

Only use keywords that are relevant to the content of your page. If you add "automobiles" to your keyword list just to generate traffic, your page should have some content related to automobiles or some search engines will reject your site.

Here is a sample blank web page with all the important META TAGS you should include. Copy the block of text and paste it in a new document. Now add all the content you want on the page between the <BODY> and </BODY> tags. Notice that the META TAGS go between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags of your page, just after your <TITLE> TAGS.
Replace all GREEN text with your own.

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Page Title Here (Load with 2 keywords)</TITLE>
<META NAME="revisit-after" CONTENT="30 days">
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="INDEX,FOLLOW">
<META NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="Short description here between quotes- (Load with 5 keywords.)">
<META NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="keywords,go,here, between,the,quotes,comma separated,with a space between words in a phrase,put the major keywords first,do not use the same word twice in a row (example - cars,auto,auto parts - is wrong because the word auto is beside itself - cars,auto parts,auto - correct) - no comma after the last word or phrase - It's best to limit the number of keywords to about 12 to 15 per page">
</HEAD>
<BODY>
Your website HTML goes here.
</BODY>
</HTML>

Choosing Keywords

Make a list of all the keywords and phrases that someone might type into a search engine to find a website like yours.

To find some keywords you may have missed, choose THE one keyword or phrase that best describes your web site, and type that into a search engine and search the net. view the source code of the top websites returned and see what other keywords they are targeting. You can view the source code of a web page by right-clicking anywhere there is no picture or link, and choosing "view source" from the pop-up menu.

One major concern to keep in mind is that the more popular a term, the more web sites will target it, making it difficult to impossible to get a top ranked return. A good twist on targeting keywords is to work your way up from the least-used keywords - I start with any keyword that gets at least 100 hits per month. It wouldn't do you any good to target the word "automobiles" if your page gets ranked on page 361,864 of the returns. If you target "automobiles lots of chrome", you may only get a few searches a month on that phrase, but your page will almost certainly be ranked in the top 3 of page 1. Target 50 keywords like that and your traffic will increase. Always keep in mind that the web is a numbers game - and sometimes those numbers are HUGE. I've heard that some sites target 5,000 or more keywords!

Keyword Suggestion Tool

Doorway Pages:

Creating doorway pages to "target" a particular keyword can be very time consuming, but can pay off in the long run with a significant increase in free traffic. Because of the different ways each search engine ranks the relevancy of web pages, you will need a doorway page to target each keyword for each engine for the best results, although a "generic" doorway page can be submitted to all the major search engines with fairly good results.

A proper doorway page must have enough content for the search engine to regard it as a serious candidate for indexing. Generally 150 to 300 words is sufficient. You should use the keyword you are targeting as the first word of the page title, the first word in the description, the first , near the middle, and last word in the body of the text, use it in the alt tag of a small picture on the page, and in one or two links to other pages on your site. And now for the bummer - if you just copy the same page and only make minor changes, you may get caught by some of the smarter spider robots and have your whole site dumped, so be creative with each page!

To get really serious about this, I'm afraid you will have to make an initial investment in the proper literature and possibly even software. Although the investment may seem high by your standards, in the long run it can pay for itself many times over with your increased traffic and sales. I use a program called Web Position Gold and have gotten some pages ranked as high as 15th place on some fairly competitive keywords.

A word of warning; most search engines will dump your site if you submit too often to them, so a good rule of thumb is to only submit one doorway page per day to each search engine. Here is a list of some sample doorway pages I have created for Melonbones to give you some ideas:

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