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Online Manual - Search Engines - Essential Elements in Creating Your Main Home Page
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Essential Elements in Creating Your Main Home Page

These tips I am going to talk about now, are going to help you get your pages listed near the top of key word search results. Other tips you should follow when creating your pages come in later chapters, and should also be incorporated, although they do not necessarily help in obtaining better placement on the search results.

Your main home page(s) will be your flagship page. It may consist of many different pages, but all relating to what you are selling or what you do. It will be the main place where you tell the world about what you do or sell. Any means of advertisement will eventually lead the user to this page. It, by itself, will not bring in huge amounts of traffic. The reason is because it can not contain all of the keywords, in the quantities needed to get your site listed near the top of all the search results. You can not possibly make one page that will score highest on ALL of the different search engines. However, you should try your best to make your main home page score as high as possible on all the different pages by combing all of what you learned by surveying each of the search database rules.

Let's assume that a user does a key word search and there, in the list of results is your page among about 5 to 10 others. The result probably lists your TITLE. That is the portion of your html document enclosed within the <title> </title> tags or the title that you listed when registering the site. It probably also has a brief description of your site. This description either came from text you entered while registering the site, or from the first few lines of your document after the title.

The users next choice will be critical. Your title and description is all he has to use to determine if he will visit your site or not. Many titles and descriptions are not well thought out. And in doing this, the user will not be certain if the site contains what he/she is looking for. If there is another title and description on the page that describes more precisely what the site contains, the user will choose it over yours.

Choosing a title that is also a good keyword will benefit you two fold. First, the search engines will grade you higher for having those keywords in your title, and the reader will know exactly what your site contains.

Making sure the text that follows your title is very descriptive of your site, what you do, or what you sell, will also help bring in the user.

Of course, in later sections of this manual, you will learn how you can try and dominate a particular keyword, so that most of the users choices will all lead to your site by repeating keywords in place of a good description. However, your primary home page should have a good descriptive title and description. You also want to make sure they are both short and to the point. There are usually limits to the length of titles and descriptions.

As mentioned before, your home page by itself will not attract a lot of traffic, but it will be seen by many and can appear high on the search engine lists if you follow a few rules.

In order to define these rules, I will give examples of good and bad code.

Following are two examples of html code for a store called "Tony's Imported Italian Cheese". Tony wants to sell his imported Mozzarella, Provolone, and Parmesan cheeses over the Internet. One code is good, while the other is not as good. This code applies to only the beginning section of the home page document.


GOOD CODE:

<html>
<META name="description" content=" Cheese - Imported Italian Mozzarella, Provolone, and Parmesan - Tony's Imported Italian Cheese">
<META name="keywords" content=" imported italian cheese provolone mozzarella parmesan ">
<head>
<title>
Cheese - Imported Italian Mozzarella, Provolone, and Parmesan - Tony's Imported Italian Cheese
</title>
</head>
<img src="logo.gif">
<p>Imported Italian Cheese by Tony. Mozzarella, Provolone, and Parmesan for sale. Shipped fresh from Italy to you.</p>

[ REST OF CODE FOR THE PAGE - PICTURES OF THE CHEESE, LINKS TO PAGES ON HOW TO ORDER, ETC.]

<! imported italian cheese imported italian cheese imported italian cheese>
<! provolone mozzarella parmesan provolone mozzarella parmesan>
<! imported italian cheese imported italian cheese imported italian cheese>
<! provolone mozzarella parmesan provolone mozzarella parmesan>
<! imported italian cheese imported italian cheese imported italian cheese>
<! provolone mozzarella parmesan provolone mozzarella parmesan>
<! imported italian cheese imported italian cheese imported italian cheese>
<! provolone mozzarella parmesan provolone mozzarella parmesan>


Let's examine the good code.

The first thing you notice is the <META> tags in the first few lines. I have not talked about these before, but they should be standard for any page. They provide the description and keywords which some search engines use to list your pages in their databases. The description should be similar to your title. Don't repeat keywords too many times here, since most search engines that look at this <META> tag ignore many repeats.

Next, Tony has a good title. It starts with the word "Cheese", which is probably his best keyword. You want to start the title with a good descriptive keyword.

Thirdly, his fist bit of text is a good description.

Next, he has placed some important keywords in his document. They are "remark" statements because of the <! > tag, so that they do not appear to the reader.

He could just put the keywords in as text at the bottom of the screen and make it the same color as the background color. However, if he is using a background image rather than a plain color, then the text will be visible to the reader.

Some people may not care that their keywords appear to the reader, and I have no preference. However, if you do make keywords that appear in the document, it is best to make them small, and move them at the end of the document.


BAD CODE

<html>
<head>
<title>
Tony's Imported Italian Cheese Home Page
</title>
</head>
<p>Welcome to my home page.</p>

<a href="http://home.netscape.com/comprod/mirror/index.html">
<img align=center hspace=8 src="imgs/now20.gif"></a>This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0. Please download Netscape now.

<p> You are visitor number <img src="/cgi-bin/counter.cgi"> since Jan 1, 1996</p>

<p> This page is still under construction, so please wear your hard hat. Here you can look around at all the cheese I have to sell. Click on the small image to see a larger picture.</p>


OK, lets look at the Naughty code.

The first mistake is in the title "Tony's Imported Italian Cheese Home Page". It is descriptive enough, but the first word is "Tony" and is what the search engine will see in the title first. It is very doubtful that anyone is going to do a search using the key word "Tony". One way to correct this is to add the name at the end of the title rather than the beginning.

What would be even worse, and I've seen this is: <title> Tony's Home Page </title>.

As another example of this principle, I will take the title of a client of mine. His company name is "Associated Radon Services". It is good in that the word Radon appears in the title, but bad that it is the second word. Most people finding his site are going to be searching the key word Radon. So to help get his site higher up on the search results, I changed his title to read: "RADON - Associated Radon Services."

This got the word Radon first, and it is duplicated in the title. Having the keyword more than once helps your grade in most search engine results, but be careful because some will actually penalize you for having the word repeated too many times.

The second flaw in the title is the use of the word "home page". Try at all costs to avoid using common words as these in your title. It will not help at all.

The next flaw is in the text that appear in the document following the title.

For search engines using the document text to gather title and description information, Tony's page would appear as follows in the keyword search result list:

Tony's Imported Italian Cheese Home Page - Welcome to my home page. This site is best viewed with Netscape Navigator 2.0. Please download Netscape now. You are visitor number. since Jan 1, 1996

This is not a good description that you want people to see. So, as a general rule, keep all information not directly related to the product or service down toward the bottom of the page.

NOTE: Some search engines allow you to place your description in a META tag. Some also allow you to define keywords in this way. You would use the META tag to enclose the text you wanted to appear as a description or to be used as keywords. It would not appear to the reader when viewing your page, but would only be used in the search engine result list. For further details, it is best to check with each search engine since they may vary from one to another on the specifics.

With your home page complete, you can now use the lessons you have learned to create special mini pages that will help you get near the top of ALL search engines for ALL keywords that you've chosen. On to the satellite plan.


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