[thelist] Re: Site Promotion

[Cayley Vos]

Excellent list, I have a few modifications of my own:

RE paid promotion  - the only one I personally do, or recommend to my clients is goto.  the rest are
sketchy.  Most search engines (altavista, iwon, canada.com,dogpile,) list the top 2 or 3 goto
results, so NOT paying for goto is a significant loss of traffic.  When creating goto listings, I
try to be explicit with what I am trying to sell and provide a clear description of what the user
will find after clicking the link. there is nothing to gain by tricking the user, it will only cost
you money, and you will loose the visitor as fast as they came.

RE:  keywords - The only META data that have any influence
in public web search engines anymore  is  the META-description and META-keywords. however,
META-keywords are  not a very important a factor anymore. Most search
engines do not give higher rankings to pages with keywords in the
META_keywords tag at all.  It is overblown.

*The title is the most important part of your SEO strategy*.
Titles can have between 6-10 words, but usually less than 8 is preferred.

Also, You have to make sure that you only list keywords that are present in the page.
Some search engines penalize for overuse of keywords in the METAkeywords tag, so I try not to repeat
them.


use the word searcher from goto.com to find what keywords are being utilized

http://inventory.goto.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/


--------------------------------- -------------
I have a client who wants more traffic to their online store. I have
developed lots of sites, but have never really been responsible for their
promotion. I did a little research on my own, and I'd like to ask thelist
what else there is to add:

Search Engine Listings:

1. Don't bother trying to trick or cheat the search engines. Their team of
well paid engineers are smarter than you and your tricks. It's an endless
game of cat and mouse that you do not have the resources to win at.

2. Keep <title>s short. Use "Back Scratcher" as a <title> instead of:
"SuperStore : Product Catalogue : Back : Back Scratcher".

3. Use whatever trick to change your querystrings from:
"index.php?category=1&product=3" to "index/category/1/product/3/".

4. <meta name="keywords"> should contain about a dozen keywords. Keywords
can at most be duplicated, like this: content="back, back scratcher, brush,
hair brush".

5. <meta name="description"> should contain a >50 word description of the
page or at least of the site.

6. Try to get other site owners to create links to your pages, in exchange
for a reciprocal link. The more links a page has pointing to it, the higher
it will rank. This can be significant. Don't waste time trying to cheat
with geocities or whatever.

7. Don't waste time trying to submit your site to the less popular search
engines. The biggies are: Yahoo, Google, Inktomi and DMOZ. Runners up still
worth considering: AltaVista, LookSmart, Lycos and Excite.

All this is basically distilled from here:
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/templates/print_template.htmlt?meta=/we
bmonkey/01/23/index1a_meta.html

Paid Promotion:

Based on my this distillation, it looks like the Yahoo and Google paid
promotions might be the best way to go. I really don't know about this
one - help!?

Cheers,

Beau

Cayley Vos, Principal

360.714.8395 office
360.223.7799 cell

http://NetPaths.net/searchengines
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search engine promotion  |  e-commerce  |  i-marketing