I wrote lately about searching the net - a video I saw from
Lynda.com. Got a personal thank-you, which I figure means about 100
or more people got something out of it. Anyway, this is also part of
that, but it’s more to the point of this forum. There is a section
on search engine optimization, or how to make spiders (googlebot)
like you. The speaker’s name is Patrick Crispen, by the way. I’m
just going to relay what he says - argue with him, not me. First, go
to www.wordtracker.com. (There may be others - probably are) They
are a company that constantly tracks internet keywords that are in
pages, and that are being searched for. It is a pay site, but
there’s a free trial that you can do for 2 hours, but as often as
you want. The catch is that it only lists MSN (#4 search engine)
keywords. When you get to the trial page (there’s an email
confirmation), type in something related to your business. It’s a
simple, four step process of narrowing down keywords that I won’t get
into here - check it out, read the manual. In the end, it will give
you a KEI - Keyword Effectiveness Index - for all the words that you
chose. The KEI is a ratio of the words in pages and searches and
other things - click on the question mark for an explanation. Notice
there’s a chart above where 50 is good, and 100 is excellent. A
while back I pointed out how many sites there are on the web, and
how you’re better off steering people to your site than getting so
uptight about keywords. Well, on that scale where 50 is only decent,
“jewelry” is.089. In fact, the best number I got that was jewelry
related was 25 - lots of jewelry out there. But not to be cynical.
What Mr. Crispen says is very simple: Spiders completely ignore meta
tags. The reason for that is because they are easily spammed. As he
did - he typed his own keywords, and then “Playboy” and “free
microsoft software”. What they look at is the meta description. His
advise is to do three things, which work together with each other:
Write a sentence using your best keywords as your meta description,
use those same keywords in the body of the page, and also in the
page title. Understand that the page title is not the banner that
you have at the top of the page. It’s what you type in the box at
the top of the dreamweaver page, or it is text in html. It’s what
the tab on explorer is labeled, or the button on your taskbar. As an
optional fourth clincher, he says to have some link on your page
that is one or more of your keywords, though he acknowleges that
isn’t so easy and not really necessary. A dead link is worse than no
link, BTW. Anyway - just thought I pass that along - this guy knows
his stuff…