[thelist] Site Promotion

[Beau Hartshorne]

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