[Sigia-l] Enhancing presence on the web

[llyon at gmx.net]

On 3 May 2003 at 4:08, Ed Housman wrote:

> In a project I'm working on the client
> wants to create an optimm set of text
> and metadata tags so that the right people
> find our page.
> 
Search engine optimisation has a lot in common with IA when done 
properly, in that it makes the info available and readable for the 
search engine robots. But there are a lot of snake oil salesmen out 
there who will "submit your site to 8,000 search engines" and the 
like, and these should be given a wide berth, as they are likely to 
indulge in disapproved practices such as cloaking.

A search engine sends out a robot agent or crawler to explore the 
web, and then analyses the sites it finds according to its individual 
algorithms to determine relevancy for a given search term. 
Directories are usually human-editor-selected - examples are Yahoo 
and Dmoz.org - and less used by searchers, but entries in a good 
directory make a big difference to search engine placement, thanks to 
those algorithms (Google in particular puts a good deal of weight on 
the quality of incoming links).

Another factor these days is paid inclusion in various forms, from 
search-targeted ads like Google's adwords to XML feeds for getting 
dynamic content indexed on very large sites.

Metatags: description is important for directories and because ir 
shows up in results pages. Keywords is not important. Title is 
extremely important. Other metatags don't appear to have any effect. 
It helps to have a robots.txt page.

Basically, if a site has a lot of valuable content and no obstacles 
in the way of spiders (eg, frames, flash intros, dhtml links) it 
should rise to the top naturally. If not, some tweaks will help, and 
probably the insertion of useful content.

Generally, if an search engine marketer pays little or no attention 
to optimising the visible text (titles, header tags, link text and 
content) and a lot of attention to magic bullets like link popularity 
or cloaking, s/he is not going to provide reliable results. The best 
places I've found for getting up to speed on this subject are:
http://www.highrankings.com/
http://www.rankwrite.com/
http://www.webmasterworld.com/ (forums)
http://www.searchenginewriting.com/
http://www.bruceclay.com/ (for the pdf chart of engine relationships)

HTH (you can tell your bosses I'll do it cheaper ;-)


regards, Laurel Lyon