Improve your ranking

Home Office Computing, Jan, 1998 by Karen L. Miller

Potential customers are hunting for a company like yours at the major search engines on the Web. Will they find you there?

Although getting your site listed with search engines isn't difficult, your goal is to ensure that your site pops up as high as possible in potential clients' searches. You should focus your energies on getting properly listed at the most popular destinations: Alta-Vista (wwwaltavista.digital.com), Excite (wwwexcite. com), Hotbot (wwwhotbot.com), InfoSeek (wwwinfoseek. com), Lycos (wwwlycos.com), Webcrawler (www. webcrawler.com), and Yahoo (wwwyahoo.com).

But each search engine indexes the Web differently. Some (Yahoo) employ people to index sites. You need to give the right information to guide these people in their decision-making. Others (AltaVista) use programmed robots. To help the robots properly categorize your site, you'll have to crawl into your home page's HTML code to change the title and meta tags. (To study the HTML coding of a Web page, go to the Source option in your browser's View menu.)

To help you list your Web site with search engines, we've taken a look at one small-business site and rated its listing efforts. Donald and Barbara Solar, owners of The Barbecue Source (wwwbbqsource.com), have been selling barbecue sauces, spices, equipment, and accessories through their virtual storefront since i996. Here's what they -- and you -- need to do.

Register your own domain name. if you host your site under your ISP's domain name (www.yourisp.com/ yourcompany), your ISP may limit robot access to your site. A domain address provides a clear indexing path. Rating: A Don had already acquired a domain name.

Choose a great domain name. Your URL in a search engine's listing is your first opportunity to make an impression. Rating: A- Don's first choice, bbq.com, was already taken. Perhaps incorporating the words "barbecue" and "sauce" would've been better.

Title your pages descriptively. After your URL, the title of your pages is the next most important thing a potential customer considers in deciding whether to visit your site. In one pithy and compelling sentence, as with an advertising headline, integrate the most obvious search term that people would use when scouting for your site's products or services. If you have more than one a e, make sure each a e has its own title. Rating: C The home page title ("Barbecue Source: Online Shopping for Spices & Sauces for Barbeque, Bar-b-q, BBQ, and Barbq") covers extensive ground but seems to confuse "title" with "keyword" (see below). More troublesome, the second page doesn't contain a title.

Include a description meta tag. Meta tags are HTML codes that provide information about your Web pages but don't appear in a browser. The description meta tag describes your site, and looks like this: . Search engines (the ones that recognize this tag) use what's written in the YOUR DESCRIPTION HERE section as the descriptive summary following your title in a search listing. Rating: F The Solars don't use the description meta tag.

Quickly describe your site in the text. Some search engines ignore the description meta tag and describe your site with the first sentence of your doculment's text. Rating: C The Solars 'text begins "Barbara and I hope you enjoy your visit...," and that's all AltaVista displays in its description of the site.

Fill the keywords meta tag. With the keywords meta tag, you tell search engines what search terms match your site. It looks like this: . Include broader concept terms and variations of words, plurals, and action verbs, such as barbecue, barbecues, barbecuing. Beware: Some search engines may actually lower your ranking if you repeat keywords several times in the title and keyword meta tag or insert hidden keywords in the background design (by using white type on a white background). If you add irrelevant words (such as "sex") to lure people, you may also anger customers. Rating: F The Solars don't use the keyword meta tag.

Place keywords in your text. For search engines that scan the text of your pages. you'll need to make sure that your pages contain at least to keyword repetitions for a higher rating. Distribute the keywords throughout, so robots don't think you're spoofing them into listing your site incorrectly. Rating: B-The Solars could beef up their keywords, but they don't spoof robots.

Adhere to catalog sites' special requirements. Unlike robot-driven search engines, with Yahoo you register directly or through a submission service. You'll do best with a directory by providing a descriptive title and keywords. Rating: A The Barbecue Source holds the number-two spot in Yahoo's Business and Economy: Companies: Food: Condiments: Barbecue Sauce. Yahoo's summary of the company ("Online source for barbecue sauces, spices, rubs, and accessories for preparing beef, pork, chicken, or fish") is excellent.

Try submission services. If you don't have the time to submit to search services directly, enlist the help of free or fee-based Web promotion sites. Submit It (www.submit-it.com), for example, submits your site information to search engines including AltaVista, InfoSeek, and WebCrawler for free. For a $60 fee, Submit It registers up to two URL submissions with hundreds more search engines and directories. Rating: A One of the Solars' first moves was to hire a service for search engine submissions. They've also registered with Submit It's free service.