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From 8/17/98 - 02/24/2K, 88642 accounts created, of which 9870 supported the site (11.13%)
Before you submit your pages to the search engines, it is crucial that you make sure they are search-engine friendly. Here are some basic tips on what to do.
For more detailed tips on search engine strategies, I highly recommend Search Engine Watch. It is the best resource on the net for learning about search engines.

Step 1 - Determine your Key Phrases

People get obsessive about their keywords. This is wrong. It is difficult if not impossible to get high rankings based on keywords. Instead, you need to think about keyphrases.

The easiest way to do this is ask yourself "what would someone trying to find me type in when they search?" Make a list of these. Try them out on the search engines -- pretend to be someone looking for your product or service.

If your business is geographically restricted, then your keyphrases should reflect this. For example, if you are a a real-estate broker in Wilmington, North Carolina, then the key phrase "buying real estate" is a waste of time; instead, the more specific phrase "buying real estate in wilmington north carolina" is what you want to be thinking about.

Think about variations on the key phrases and write them down. Continuing with our example:
The above is only a partial list, but you get the idea. You can also get a good idea of what keyphrases and page design techniques work well by looking at other pages that do well in the searches you've tried. I discuss how to do that in more detail in my Improving Your Rankings article. Note that this sample list is just a list of possible keyphrases -- we're not going to use all of them because we won't have room.
One of your fellow users, Stephen Sherman, pointed out an interesting subtlety about keyphrase selection. Let's assume you find a keyphrase that you think people will type in a lot. Try it, and look at the results. If the results seem to be "on topic", then people are likely to drill down several pages to find a listing that is just right for them. This kind of keyphrase is one you want to target, but if you don't get on page one, you'll still get traffic. If, on the other hand, the results are mostly irrelevant (or full of spammed listings), then people will rarely look at page 2, or even more than the first few listings. These keyphrases are thus not as valuable. This doesn't automatically mean you shouldn't try to target it -- none of the criteria are absolutes -- but it does mean that it will be more difficult to get a useful listing with that keyphrase.

One final tip. Two great resources for finding out what keywords are the most effective are the Goto.com Search Suggestions Page and WordTracker. On Goto's search suggestion page, you just type in a very general keyphrase (like "real estate") and it tells you all of the more specific keyphrases that relate to that keyphrase and how many hits they got.

For example, in October 1999, the broad keyword "real estate" was searched for 67016 times on goto.com, whereas "north carolina real estate" got 489 searches. Doing a search suggestion on "wilmington" revealed several hundred hits on "wilmington north carolina," "wilmington nc" and related topics. Zooming in even further, getting a suggestion on "wilmington real" found 36 hits on specific queries related to real estate in wilmington, nc. The top position on those queries could be had for a penny each. Such a deal!

But more importantly, the goto.com tool lets you see which of your potential keyphrases actually generates the most queries - and those are the ones you usually want to target first.

Those of you who have contributed and gained access to the Secret Net Tools will want to check out the Keyword Susser tool, which will do multiple queries using the Goto.com Search Suggestions system and merge the results. It's a really great way to find out what your keywords actually are.

WordTracker goes a bit further. It helps you develop lists of relevant keywords, ranked by their popularity. It then queries Altavista to determine which keywords are the least competitive. It's usually not much use targeting a popular keyword (lots of searches) if there are millions of other pages that contain that keyword. On the other hand, a relevant keyword that only gets a few searches a day but which has only a few pages competing for it is a good candidate, because it will be much easier to get a high ranking. WordTracker has a free trial that will give you a lot of information, and additional services available by subscription.
Disclaimer: WordTracker pays me a commission on any income generated from clickthroughs from SelfPromotion.com, but as usual, I donate all such income to the Salvation Army in order to preserve my editorial independence.

My advice is to use the Goto.com tool to get a rough idea what your keywords should be (and find ones you might not have thought about), and then use WordTracker to determine which ones you really should be targeting.

OK. At this point, you know what your best keyphrases are. You've got your list. You've checked it twice. Now it's time to use it!

Step 2 - Crafting your <TITLE> tag

Most people make the mistake of using a page title that's good for people but lousy for the search engines. Big mistake. A title like "Bill Phillips - Real Estate Broker" is a disaster! The golden rule is this: All your most important keywords should be in the TITLE tag. So what you do is look at your keyphrases, make a list of all the important words, and create a title tag that uses them. Also, keep in mind that since browsers only display the first few words of a title tag (whatever fits into the title bar of the window). So, while the first sentence of your title tag should be "human readable", the rest can be just a list of keywords.

There is some debate as to whether a very long title tag is a good thing or a bad thing when it comes to search engines. Some people are concerned that a very long title tag might result in the search engines deciding the page is a "spam page." I'm waffling on this issue right now. Based on the available (scanty!) evidence, my advice is to keep the title between 15 and 20 words. But you might want to try longer title tags on some of your pages, just to see what happens! So Bill Phillips might have a title that looks like this:

<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Offices Office Space</TITLE>

The reason for this is that the three most important places to have keywords and phrases are your title tag, your meta tags, and your first paragraph. You want them to all contain the same important words; this increases your keyword density and improves your rankings.

Step 3 - The Meta Tags

The fabled Meta tags are important to getting good rankings, and on many search engines, the page title (often truncated) and the Meta Description tag are what gets displayed.

Meta tags go in the <HEAD> section of the HTML page (the same section as the <TITLE> tag). The Meta Description tag should contain a short description of the web-page. Guess what? You've already written one for the <TITLE> tag! So just edit that to make it totally human readable (and perhaps a little shorter), and you're done. The format of a Meta description tag is simple. It looks like this:

<META name="description" content="whatever you want to place here">

So, in our example, we might use:

<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments, Commercial Property and Office Space">

My advice on the length of this description is keep it between 100 and 200 characters.

The other Meta tag is the Meta Keywords tag. What you do is take your keyphrases, and enter them in the order you think is most appropriate, separated by commas. Don't repeat a keyphrase, and don't repeat any individual word more than 5 times or so. This may mean that you can't use some of your better keyphrases.

The reason why you don't want to repeat any particular word more than 5 times is that some search engines may penalize you for doing this. It isn't likely that this will happen if you exceed 5, but play it safe. The exception is common "noise" words like "the", "in", "a", "and" and so on. Most search engines ignore them. I'd leave them in just in case, but don't worry if you have more than 5 of any of them.

If you want to get really fancy, play the cunning comma trick. The reason you have commas in keyword meta tags is that some search engines use them; they consider the actual phrases as important in your ranking. Most search engines don't however; they just look at the words, and a comma is the same as a space to them. But even so, the fact that words are next to each other means something to them. So if you can put two keyphrases together with a comma between them, and the last words of the first keyphrase coupled with the first words of the next keyphrase make up one of your keyphrases, then you've gotten 3 keyphrases for the price of two! Normally, however, this is difficult, so don't waste too much time over it.

Keep your keywords meta-tag length between 200 and 500 characters. Unfortunately, this means you may not be able to include all of your key phrases in your meta keywords tag. To deal with this, the trick is to remember that you can put different keyphrases on different pages on your site. So what you do is make your home page have general keyphrases, and then create different sets of meta keywords tags for your other pages that exclusively target more specific topics (such as "selling a home"; and the same goes for the titles and descriptions on those pages as well!). After doing that pruning, our sample keywords tag might look like this:

<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,buying a house in new hanover county,buying a home in new hanover county,selling a house in new hanover county,renting a house in new hanover county,renting an apartment in new hanover county,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental">

Step 4 - The first paragraph

The first paragraph of your page should recapitulate and expand upon everything in your title and meta tags. You need to have all those keyphrases in it. However, since this is going to be read by people, it needs to be written with them in mind. This is where you introduce yourself to your visitors, so you want to make a good impression.

Try to put this first paragraph as close to the <BODY> tag as possible. Avoid putting graphics or other HTML in front of your first paragraph as much as you can. I don't have a banner ad on my homepage for this reason. Also, use the <H1> or <H2> tag to emphasize your opening sentence (but make sure it looks tasteful!). Bill Phillips might use the following opening paragraph:

<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide.

Putting it all together

Combining steps 1-4, we get some HTML that looks like this

<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying Selling Renting Houses Homes Apartments Commercial Property Offices Office Space</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Real Estate in Wilmington, North Carolina - Buying, Selling & Renting of Houses, Homes, Apartments and Commercial Property">
<META name="keywords" content="real estate in wilmington north carolina,buying real estate in wilmington north carolina,selling real estate in wilmington north carolina,renting real estate in wilmington north carolina,real estate broker in wilmington north carolina,buying a house in new hanover county,buying a home in new hanover county,selling a house in new hanover county,renting a house in new hanover county,renting an apartment in new hanover county,house broker,apartment broker,home sales,apartment rental"> </HEAD>
<BODY>
<H2>Are you interested in buying, selling or renting real estate in Wilmington, North Carolina?</H2><BR>
If so, you've come to the right place. My name is Bill Phillips, and for the last 10 years, I've specialized in helping my clients find the perfect home, apartment or commercial space in beautiful New Hanover County. Please allow me to be your guide.

... rest of your html
</BODY>
</HTML>

Avoid Search Engine Tricks

Many "experts" advise trying to trick search engines by putting keywords in comments, putting them in text that is the same color as your background, and so on. I strongly advise that you not try these tricks. Bluntly, most of them don't work -- and the ones that do may stop working at any minute, as the search engines are constantly trying to detect and defeat them.

My philosophy is that you should try and help the search engines by making it as easy as possible to get a good idea of what your page is about. That way, as search engines get better and better at rating the contents of sites, your rankings will get better over time, with no effort from you.

Don't get hyped about the new long domain names

I've been getting a lot of questions about the new, longer domain names that are available. There is a lot of misinformation being passed around about them. The big lie is that if you have a domain name with lots of keywords in it (ie: add-url-register-website-promote-site-selfpromotion.com) you will get a higher ranking in the search engines.

This is flat out not true. NONE of the major search engines will significantly boost your rankings based on keywords in your url. Not one. This is what they said when Danny Sullivan, editor of the highly recommended Search Engine Watch Newsletter asked them, and I've confirmed it by experiment. If the search engines look at them at all, they simply add the url text to the rest of the page, so the added benefit of keywords in the URL is totally insignificant. Don't waste your money.

My advice is to try and go for a short, memorable domain name, either 1 word or 2 words combined, or with an i, e, i- or e- prefix. Make it easy to type, and easy to remember. You can see a list of 1-word domain names that were still available as of early January 2000 here. Maybe one of them will be just right for you.

If you insist on trying the keywords in URL, do it either using subdirectories (ie: http://selfpromotion.com/add-url/register-website/promote-site.html) or subdomains (ie: http://add-url-register-website-promote-site.selfpromotion.com/). You'll still be wasting your time, but at least you won't be wasting money!

A note about Framed sites

Many "experts" also say that using frames to construct your website can hurt their rankings. My experience is that this is not so, as long as you construct your frames properly. The trick is this: make sure that your <frameset> page has a proper title tag and meta tags. Similarly, your subframe pages should have the same ingredients (perhaps with modified contents), as well as a little bit of javascript that "pops" the user to the proper framed presentation if they surf into the subframe page. Here's some sample javascript that works with just about every browser:

<BODY onLoad="if (top == self) top.location.href = 'http://www.yourserver.com/yourframe.html';">

What this does is, when the page is loaded, if it finds that it is not in a frame, it redirects the browser to the proper frameset url, whatever that might be. A much more detailed explanation of how this can be done in various ways can be found in this excellent article.

Once you've got your pages configured, simply promote them all (the frameset page and the subframe pages) to the search engines. The MultiSubmitter tool, which you get access to by forking over $10 or more, makes this easy!

What about a "robots.txt" file?

The robots.txt file is a special file you can place on your webserver to restrict access by some or all webcrawling robots to some or all of your site. You only need one if you want to place some areas of your website "off-limits" to robots. If your whole website is open to them, you don't need one.

You can only have a robots.txt file if you own your own domain, because they are always located in the same place (so the robot can find them!). Thus, my robots.txt file is located at http://selfpromotion.com/robots.txt.

If you feel you need a robots.txt file, then the complete specification how to create one can be found here.

One caution: some robots interpret a blank robots.txt file as meaning "don't crawl any pages on this website." So if you don't need a robots.txt file, don't have one (even a blank one!) on your server.

Meta Tag Software

While I have not personally used it, if you are looking for a Macintosh-based tool to manage the meta tags of many pages, you might want to check out Meta Tag Manager. Windows-based users who have found a good tool, please email me and let me know which ones you like.

Next step on the site tour: Tutorial on how to use the submission engine


If you would like to reprint this article in your online or paper newsletter, please contact me for permission.

About this site...
This site was developed on a Macintosh, programmed in WebSiphon, and served by WebStar. The author, on those exceedingly rare occasions when he does think, indeed thinks differently.

It looks (and works) better when you use version 4.0 or better of Netscape Navigator or Internet Explorer, but can be used with any tables-capable browser.

SelfPromotion.com ©1997-2000 Robert Woodhead, All Rights Reserved. SelfPromotion.com™, Tooter™, Secret Net Tools™, MultiSubmitter™, Rankulator™, BaldSpotCam™, and ShareService™ are trademarks of Robert Woodhead. To get help, report bugs, or make suggestions, go here.