Ask Mr. D - On Search Engine Tactics

By Bill Daugherty
Posted Wednesday, October 20, 2004

Dear Mr. D,

My question is about getting a website listed on the major search engines.

For the past several months I have been submitting my website to several of the major search engines. But, I don't think I am listed by any of them. At least I can find my site when I do a search for my keywords.

Can you take a look at my site and tell me if there is something wrong with my site that is preventing me from getting listed? This is really frustrating.

Signed,

Frustrated

____________________________

Dear Frustrated,

Getting listed on any of the major search engines can be a trying adverture. But, so much of Web traffic comes from these engines, it is worth the effort.

The reason your site is being ignored by the major engines is you don't have any meta tags in your code. When you submit your site to a search engine they send a spider to crawl your site for all the other details. And the very first thing this spider looks for is ... Meta Tags!

If you don't have Meta Tags in place, things can get ugly. The spider will move to the text on your page, with the end result being a really messy site description and no keywords ... that's bad!

Meta tags should be placed between the head tags of your sites code. They should contain your site's title, description and keywords. If you are not knowledgeable about building meta tags, I suggest you consult someone who does. Even it cost you a few bucks, the amount of traffic increase you will see will more than make up for the cost.

Do you have an advertising or marketing question you'd like to see published in this column? Send it to mailto:MrD@epm.zzn.com You can visit Mr. D's website at: (http://www.freeadsgalore.com)
To visit Mr. D's latest project Goto: (http://www.instantez.com/wdindex.html)

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