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Criteria for Web Site Success
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The following is some information with regard to improving a web site’s presence on the web. I should mention that each search engine uses its own criteria for ranking a web site, and that these criteria can change over the course of time.
Please click here to see my contact information.
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| Page Titles |
Many search systems use page titles as the basis of their indexing, so the more meaningful your title, the more likely your site will be found. When someone uses one of the search engines, pages that have the search terms in their titles are often assumed to be more relevant than others.
When someone adds your web site to their list of favorite places or ‘bookmarks’, the bookmark is given the exact title of your page.
These are the characteristics of a good web page title:
It will specifically describe your product or service.
It will make proper use of 3 or 4 keywords.
The length will be between 10 and 150 characters long.
The number of words will be less than 10.
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| META Tags |
A META tag does not display anything to be when a person looks at a web page, but it does contain information that search engines will use to rate and index pages. The two most commonly used META tags are the Keywords tag and the Description tag.
Keywords
The Keywords tag will contain key words and phrases that are relevant to what your business or organization does. For instance, a home remodeling company would use such phrases as “home remodeling” and “home improvement”.
A search engine will analyze how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. A key word or phrase should be used more than three times in the body of a site’s text.
Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning.
For optimal results your Keywords tag should be between 50 and 250 characters long.
Description
The Description tag will contain a brief description of what your site is about. The description tag allows you to influence the description of your page in the crawlers that support the tag. All the major crawlers support the description tag, to some degree. If you have a description tag on your pages, you'll most likely see the content used in some way.
| Site Registration |
You can sign up with a service that will register your site with multiple search engines; these services are cost effective as well as time savers. One such service, Traffic Blazer, is provided by GoDaddy (http://www.godaddy.com). Submitnet.net (http://www.submitnet.net) is another. |
| Link Exchange |
| By analyzing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be "important" and thus deserving of a ranking boost. |
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Clickthrough Measurement |
A search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, and eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren't attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. |
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Further Information |
| A survey by Murphy Associates, Your Marketing Department, identified what people particularly like and dislike in websites. Contact John Murphy at john@MarketingWithMurphy.com or call (262) 786-7424 to get the results of this survey. |
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Contact Me |
| Address: |
4000 W. Rivers Edge Circle, #7
Milwaukee, WI 53209 |
| Telephone: |
(414) 371-1526 |
| E-Mail: |
dtacke@wi.rr.com |
Comments about this web site can be sent to dtacke@wi.rr.com
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