Site Schemes

People are looking for you . . . Can you be found?

After investing marketing dollars into a site, website owners want results. To get results a website has to be found by search engines.

If you have ever used the web for business or entertainment, at one time or another you found yourself using a search engine to find whatever it is you need to find. Before I became involved with website design, I thought that people who worked for the search engines ranked the websites from 1 to 8 million with the “best” sites coming out on top. Now that I have worked in the field for almost four years, I have learned several things about search engines and how they work.

• Yahoo and Open Directory and a few other directories, not search engines, have people that visit websites and determine how to rank them within their category.
  
  
• Most search engines use spiders to crawl the web. These spiders use different formulas to determine the relevance of the site to particular keywords. Some search engines place more importance in the title of a web page while others rank a site higher if the keyword is used near the top of the page or in the photo captions that appear when a mouse rolls over a picture.

• Using a keyword in a domain name often ranks high with search engines. If a restaurant named “Joe’s Place” bought the domain name ww.steaksandshrimp.com, their website would get a higher ranking under steak and shrimp.
  
  
• If a keyword appears too many times on one web page, the entire site can be banned from a search engine. The reason for doing this is to prohibit what is called spam, a term used to describe websites that intentionally misrepresent themselves to get a high rank using a keyword that does not accurately describe the site’s purpose. Most of the time “get rich quick” websites are the guiltiest of spammers. Unfortunately, sites that are not spam are sometimes considered spam by spiders.
  
  
• Submitting a website to 1,500 search engines for $19.95 will not guarantee top rankings. Repeatedly submitting a page to search engines will not secure top rankings either.

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The top ten search terms from January 28th through February 4th, 2002:

1. U.S. immigration
2. mp3
3. green card
4. green card lottery
5. immigration
6. sex
7. muscle
8. music
9. hgh
10. travel

http://www.wordspot.com/

If advertisements popping out of nowhere are interfering with your web work or pleasure, close them quickly using the keyboard shortcut Control-W.

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/

The first U.S. coin to bear the words “United States of America,” was a penny piece made in 1727. It was also inscribed with the plain-spoken motto: “Mind Your Own Business.”

http://www.funtrivia.com/

About Site Schemes’ Virtual Assistant Update

Site Schemes brings you this newsletter to help you learn new ways to use your computer and the Internet, to get organized, to use the Web for research, to market your products and services, and to acquaint you with Site Schemes' services.

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