Read Attract Visitors to Your Site: The Mini Missing Manual Online
Authors: Matthew MacDonald
Unfortunately, there’s a huge caveat here. Most search engines don’t use the keyword list any longer. That’s because it was notorious for abuses (many a webmaster stuffed his keyword list full of hundreds of words, some only tangentially related to what was actually on the site). Search engines like Google take a more direct approach—they look at all the words in your web page, and pay special attention to words that appear more often, appear in headings, and so on. Most web experts argue that the keyword list has outlived its usefulness, and many don’t bother adding it to their pages at all.
DESIGN TIME
The Importance of Titles and Image Text
A search engine draws information from many parts of your page, not just the meta elements. To make sure your pages are search-engine-ready, you should check to make sure you use the
Alternate image text is the text a browser displays if it can’t retrieve an image. You specify this text using the
alt
attribute in the element. Search engines pay attention to the alternate text—for example, Google, uses it as the basis for its image-searching tool (
http://images.google.com/
). If you don’t have
alt
text, Google has to guess what the picture is about by looking at nearby text, which is less reliable.
The
, shown earlier). Finally, the
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTION
Keyword Tricks
Can I make my website more popular by adding hidden keywords
?
There are quite a few unwholesome tricks that crafty Web weavers use to game the search engine system (or at least try). For example, they might add a huge number of keywords, but hide the text so it isn’t visible on the page (white text on a white background is one oddball option, but there are other style-sheet tricks). Another technique is to create pages that aren’t really a part of your website, but that you store on your server. You can fill these pages with repeating keyword text. To implement this trick, you use a little JavaScript code to make sure real people who accidentally arrive at the page are directed to the entry point of your website, while search engines get to feast on the keywords.
As seductive as some of these tricks may seem to lonely websites (and their owners), the best advice is to avoid them altogether. The first problem is that they pose a new set of headaches and technical challenges, which can waste hours of your day. But more significantly, search engines learn about these tricks almost as fast as Web developers invent them. If a search engine catches you using these tricks, it may ban your site completely, relegating it to the dustbin of the Web.
If you’re still tempted, keep this in mind: Many of these tricks just don’t work. In the early days of the Web, primitive search engines gave a site more weight based on the number of times a keyword cropped up, but modern search engines like Google use much more sophisticated page-ranking systems. A huge load of keywords probably won’t move you up the search list one iota.
Directories and Search Engines
Now that you’re well on your way to perfecting and popularizing your site, it’s time to start looking at the second level of Internet promotion—search engines. Getting your website into the most important search engine catalogs is a key step in publicizing it. Working your way up the rankings so web searchers are likely to find you takes more work, and monopolizes the late-night hours of many a webmaster.
Directories
Directories
are searchable site listings with a difference: humans, not programs, create them. That means that a small army of workers painstakingly puts together a collection of sites, neatly sorted into categories. The advantage of directories is that they’re well-organized. A couple of clicks can get you a complete list of California regional newspapers, for example. The unquestioned disadvantage is that directories are dramatically smaller than
full-text search
catalogs. That means directories aren’t very useful for those in search of a piece of elusive information that doesn’t easily fall into a category, like a list of the English language’s most commonly misspelled words. Over the years, as the Web’s ballooned in size, directories have become increasingly specialized, and full-text search tools like Google and Yahoo have become the most common way that people hunt for information.
So, given that directories are just the unattractive cousins of full-text search engines, why do you need to worry about them? Two reasons. First, some web visitors still use directories, even if they don’t use them as often as they do full-text search engines. Second, some search engines (including Google) pay attention to directory listings, and tend to rank sites higher if they turn up in certain directories. Getting into the right directories can help you start to move up the results list in a full-text search. And just like college, getting into a directory requires that you submit an application, which you’ll learn about next.
The Open Directory Project
The most important directory to submit your site to is the Open Directory Project (ODP) at
http://dmoz.org/
. The ODP is a huge, long-standing website directory staffed entirely by thousands of volunteer editors who review submissions in countless categories. The ODP isn’t the most popular web directory (that honor currently goes to the Yahoo directory), but other search engines use it behind the scenes. In fact, Google bases its own directory service (
http://directory.google.com/
) on the ODP.
Before submitting to the ODP, take the time to make sure you do it right. An incorrect submission could result in your website not getting listed at all. You can find a complete description of the rules at
http://dmoz.org/add.html/
, but here are the key requirements:
The next step is to spend some time at the
http://dmoz.org/
site, until you find the single best category for your site (see
Figure 1-4
).
Once you do, click the “suggest URL” link at the top of the page and fill out the submission form (see
Figure 1-5
). The form asks for your URL, the title of your site, a brief description, and your email address.
Note: If you have some free time on your hands, you can offer to help edit a site category—just click the “Become an editor” link. And even if you don’t have editorial aspirations, why not check out the editor guidelines at
http://dmoz.org/guidelines/
to get a better idea of what’s going on in the mind of ODP editors, and how they evaluate your site submission?
Figure 1-4:
Top: When you first get to the ODP site, you see a group of general, top-level categories.
Once you submit your site, there’s nothing to do but wait (and submit your site to the other directories and search engines discussed in this chapter). If two or three weeks pass without your site appearing in the listing and you haven’t received an email describing any problems with it, try submitting your site again. If that still doesn’t work, it’s time to contact the category editor. Write a polite email asking why your site wasn’t added to the listings, and include the date of your submission(s) and the name, URL, and description of your site. You can find the email address for the category editor at the very bottom of the category page (see
Figure 1-6
).