Being listed in a search engine?
Nolf-Job
Inside each and every one of you!
My best friend's dad owns his own print shop. He just recently set up a website and everything, and is wondering what he needs to do to be listed in search engines. I thought you just needed to code some stuff under the meta tag, but I don't know. Can anyone fill me in.
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While there are companies that provide hit optimization, I would look at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ and learn how search engines work, and start with cheaper things like tuning metatagging for the bots used to look at sites.
For a local business, the best thing is to tie website into print advertising, possibly in a brochure thta summarizes WHY folks whould visit this site per se. Stick the URL in aphone book ad or newspaper ad, and make at least part of the site a brochure expansion that tells why this approach to business is good and perhaps to educate in a small way as to what this printing firm has that is special about it.
Doing that and getting reaction is a good way to start off a site that can make more than it spends. Start small and grow with demand, make site react to demand.
An internationally tuned site is no good if you do not print in many languages and simultaneously be able to make a profit getting product there somehow. The site has to in some way pay its way, but some of what it can do wuill be indirect in advertising and explaining things in an easily accessible way-- ie goodwill building and customer attraction. First focus on company's special strengths, then add in faster responsiveness and customer-to-printer and printer-to-customer workflow faciltiation features as customers ask strongly enough for them that they are obviously going to be used.
I would not immediately buy search engine tuning feature services or subscription based software tuners, which most optimizers are when you look at the contracts and terms of service or software use agreements, so much as get site lited in Chamber of Commerce sites local to market area, the phone book, and other places that advertise more traditionally AND on the web, and make the published email address one which will allow feedback on site also, or publish a small set of such email adresses, like a sales contact address, a general questions address, and a feedback address. Part of what search engines do is look for web cross-links to the sites being indexed. Thety sort that against eh metatags, which are words that describe what the site is really ab out and help spiders figure out what to look for and index in any one html page within a site as well more general metas on home page for site overall listing for home page.
If your friend's dad has a company that specializes in book printing, make a meta that says books and one printing, if mostly small jobs of many sorts, various and printign could be home page meta and detial pages ciould have metas that describe the details of what is done. for a locality, a meta with citry name, state name, might be appropriate also. A page can have more than one metatag, and if you have metas more than one sorted by info type then you can get most bang for accurate sorting into results. One for geographic and one for company major work, will elt the engine answer
Punta +Gorda +Florida +"brochure printer" for someone needing a job lot of brochures printed up. If you ahve a good desktop publisher working for you, tell about that in site and add desktop publishing to the metatags for the page that explains about creating unique brochures (as a working example). If company has or actively wants county wide business, then include county name also. define geographic metas to marketr area site is intended to serve, and make market area the actual market area to start with if this is a new company or the established market area if company has grown and has a home market per se.
Trick is to have more general metatags on general pages, and more specific ones on subpages where the specific content is. Organize metas so they relate tightly to content. Make the metas be an hyper-short single word or very short phrase set that describes what is fed by the page of code being shown as a "page" to a browser. In essence, they micro-synopsize the page content if ideal, and page links to other parts of site will be added by bot.
John D.
Rule 1: promises to reveal search engine secrets and placement are hype. They are promises to lure you away from your money.
Rule 2: Search engines, like Google, "like" a no-frame, non-flash style of website far better than a real fancy, schmancy site. The search engine robots look for text. They don't see pictures. They don't see flash.
If you do have pictures make sure they have the ALT tags with short keyword type descriptions.
The short-media.com front page is a good example of a good looking no frame, non-flash site that search engines get a lot from.
Rule 3: Be smart with meta tags, key words, site description code. This goes hand in hand with rule 4:
Rule 4: Know who you are wanting to reach. "Everyone" isn't enough. If you are too broad then you'll end up missing the mark. Target your consumer and code the meta, keywords and site description to those people. Using too many keywords (over 250 characters) and you'll end up being less effective in ranking.
Be unique and specific with your keywords too. EG: AMD is an awfully broad keyword for SM. remove omegasearch is a damn specific keyword combination and it really ranks us high.
Rule 5: Make sure the keywords and meta tags in the code appear on the page a couple of times. Search engines look for this and rank accordingly.
Rule 6: Links on your site leading to other pages should be text based or combined with image based links. Think this way "on the main page can I read the link and know where it will go then follow it like a road."
These are the most basic of rules. Reading many sources will help you weed past the mess of information. Remember...everyone always has "the secret" so learn from what they tell you but don't believe that they know the absolute answer.
Rule 7: Get a coder who knows how to set up the site, code it well and optimise it for search engines. PM Dan...he's not free but he can be hired and the small investment can pay for itself.
I'm not selling Dan...but he is worth paying something and I believe his services shoudn't be given away.
MM, have you ever seen an a href tag pair in an ALT??? That is one way to get an image link XREF'd on Google.
EXCELLENT summarized rule set-- I use searchenginewatch for info as one of the writers there wrote a book on search engines that is hyper-good.
AFAIK, it came into existence more than 4-5 yerars ago. It has so little hype in it that it is a bible-grade book for search engine knowledge for some. When I have some time, will see when it was last pub'ed and by what publisher and post the info.
John_D, once named Ageek here.
You mean like a map? Where part of the image is a clickable link?
I meant that the image should also have an identifiable text name embedded so robots can "see" it too.