Posted by arlene

Registering your site at the major search engines is your first and most important step in marketing your Web store. Although there are hundreds and hundreds of search engines, directories, and yellow pages that you can register your site with, you should register your site first with these major search engines.

All these sites search the Web in one of two ways. Either they’re a directory such as Yahoo! that searches its own database, or they search actual Web pages looking for keywords residing in the page itself.

There are two recent additions to the search engine world that search the Web a little differently. You also should register with these new search engines. Google! at google.com uses text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to a search. Google! keeps track of which pages actually get chosen when presented in a search result. The next time that keyword is searched on, it remembers which pages were selected by the user before and presents those pages high on the search results list. Direct Hit at directhit .com is a similar site that ranks search results according to what other people have selected as the most relevant and popular sites for their search request.

Registering your Web site at the major search engines is relatively simple. The challenge is making your site appear at the top of the search results list when a shopper searches for an eTailer that sells your products or services. To accomplish this feat, you have to optimize your site for the major search engines.

Optimization is more art than science because each search engine uses different search rules. But there are some key things you can do to ensure that your Web store does not come up as site number 1,000 in a search results list. Now, there are many books and online services that claim to guarantee top placement in the major search engines if you use their tricks and services. But the search engines regularly change the ways they search the Web, so many of these tricks do not hold true for long.

Whatever your choice, you need to know the general basics of how search engines search the Web. As I said before, search engines fall into two basic groups. Some search their own database, such as Yahoo!, and some search actual Web pages looking for keywords residing in the page itself, such as AltaVista. This means you have to know how to register with a search engine directory, such as Yahoo!, and what search engines, such as AltaVista, to look for.

To optimize for both, you have to keep the following in mind.

Page Titles, Keywords, and Your Web Pages

It’s very important that you take care when creating the title, description, keywords, altags, and the first paragraph of your Web pages. The search engines in one way or another will read this text and use it to return a list of search results to the Web surfer making a search.

Don’t make the mistake of creating a page title that’s good for people but bad for the search engines. Don’t use a title for your page such as “mySoftware Store—We Sell Computer Software.” With a title like that, you’re asking to be overlooked by the search engines. Keep this rule in mind: All your most important keywords must be in the title tag. Make a list of all the keywords that describe your Web store and create a title tag that uses them with the most important words first.

A good title tag for your page would read:

<T I TLE>Productivity software for business and home office use—selling word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software including utilities and accessories—mySoftware Store, your store for business productivity</ TITLE>

Notice that your company name is near the end of the title tag. Why? Your page description will probably be truncated by the search engine, so you want your most important information on what you offer upfront.

Another reason for all this verbiage is that the three most important places to have keywords and phrases are your title tag, your metatags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words because this will improve your ranking in a search result. Why? Because all these keywords in all your tags increases your keyword density and improves your rankings.

Now let’s look at your metatags.

The metatags are important to getting a good ranking in the search results. Metatags come in two flavors—the description metatag and the keyword metatag. The description metatag is a brief description (about 100-200 characters) of what’s on a Web page.

The description metatag looks something like this:

<META name=”description” content=”Productivity software for business and home office use—selling word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software including utilities and accessories“>

The other metatag is the keywords tag. Create a set of keyword phrases that explain your page or site and list them in the metatag separated by commas.

A good resource for choosing the right keywords is GoTo.com. You can use its service at inventory.go2.com/inventory/searchInventory.mp to see how many times a particular keyword has been searched on. This can help you choose keywords for your site that will drive more traffic to your store.

After you have your keywords, turn them into key phrases. Don’t repeat a key phrase, and don’t repeat any individual keyword more than five times or so. The reason for this is that many of the search engines will penalize you for doing this.

Here’s an example of a keywords metatag:

<META name=”keywords” content=”productivity software, word processing, accounting software, spreadsheet software, productivity tools for business, home office computer software, virus protection, modems, surge suppressors”>

Finally, pay attention to the first paragraph of the Web page you are registering with the search engines. The first paragraph of your Web page should duplicate and expand upon everything in your title and metatags. Make sure the first paragraph has all your key phrases in it. Turn those keywords, key phrases, and title into a welcoming message that will make a good first impression on the consumer visiting your site.

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