UBB.Developers Forums Community Development Promoting Your Community Some Searchengines Tips

Just read the post about meta keywords that he posted about 2 months ago.

I've worked on searchengine submission some time ago. Then I did some rework on the main page. In our field (mountainbike downhill) there are not that many competitors and so we are number one at google.com (keyword: "downhill" or "mountainbike downhill") and at altavista.com ("mountainbike downhill", " mountainbike downhill") at the moment. Therefore the following tips may be useful for you:

Use visible text on your main page. Not simply a big image with "Enter here" beneath. Every word you want to be found with has to occur in the text. Try to place the most important word's in the title and description of the page. This is pretty easy if the W3T Main Index is your main page: Usually the words are already contained in the category or forum names. Else use them in the forum description. Use the important keywords at the top of the page. Hold the total page size short.

Words in the keyword metatag are totally useless if they don't occur in the text.

You get a higher ranking if the keyword is contained in the domain name.

I think that about 95% of all visitors coming from a search engine come from a top 5 to top 10 search engine. So, enter your site there manually, not just by using a (free) search engine submission tool. Try to get into the Yahoo directory. (Retry it from time to time, if it doesn't work the first time.)

And last but not least:
If it's possible, make a link page on your site and ask partner-sites, sites which may be interesting to your visitors and even competitors for a link exchange. Your ranking will be higher the more important sites link to yours.

One interesting site: Search Engine World - Spiders
And some statistics: Search Engine Watch - Reviews, Ratings, Tests

nòóx

Downhill Rangers

Just saw here that my information about metatags is out of date. Sorry. On this chart you can find that the ranking at AltaVista, Excite, FAST, Google and NLight is NOT influenced by the meta tags at all! (March 2001)

So text (visible, not too small) and link popularity are the most important influencing factors.

I always wonder if the bots would dedect it as spam, if one would make invisible/small text with CSS. But we don't want spam, so we won't use it []/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/] .

nòóx

Downhill Rangers

noox--

Thanks for your posts. Good info.

Yahoo is a place I have not registered because it seems to require payment for commercial sites. (Not sure if mine really is commercial, though).

What has been your experience with that issue?

:-Doug.
[][email protected][/]
www.FootprintsintheWind.com

As far as I know you can suggest commercial sites with the "Standard Submission" too. But there it is not guaranteed that somebody from Yahoo reviews your site.

I think I tried about two times shortly after the start of our page but with no success. Than I read a lot of peoply being angry with yahoo because they never get listed there. So I gave up for a while. But about half a year later I tried again, we where listed and Yahoo became our top referrer. (Now it's google)

So I'd suggest to try it again several times a year. (When you just have nothing else to do. []/testimages/icons/wink.gif[/]).

nòóx

Downhill Rangers

You can pay to be listed but it is not required. However, it is hard getting listed on yahoo. Just keep trying every 6 months to a year and at some point maybe you will get lucky.

It does seem to help by getting in other directories/listings first especially if you don't want to pay for the yahoo directory.

Thanks to both of you. I guess I will try it!

:-Doug.
[][email protected][/]
www.FootprintsintheWind.com