Prepare your website pages for submission.

1) Being specific is imperative.

The more general the information covered on your web page, the more you have to compete with other site's web pages. For example, a Yahoo search on "flowers" returns 13,200,000 web pages whereas "roses" returns 4,490,000 and "antique roses" returns only 167,000 and "care of antique roses" returns 28,400 and a search on "lamarque rose" returns just 3,860, which is still a large number of web pages.

Statistics tell us that 75% of all Internet users will select from one of the first three listings found on a search, so it is very important to be listed under search terms that we will have at least some chance of being listed in that first page of results.

Research also shows that when consumers use more specific keywords that they are in the "Buying Decision" stage and that 3-5%+ will purchase your product or service.

2) Choose your words carefully.

Now that we know how important it is to be very specific, the next question would be how many people are searching for the words that we select, hereafter referred to as keywords. For example, the word "flower" was searched 837,534 times in December 2002, whereas, "lamarque rose" did not show up as having been something that had been searched for at all.

We can now use a free tool provided by Overture, a pay-per-click system that we'll talk more about later, that can be found here: inventory.overture.com. A search on "antique roses" shows all the different search terms that include "antique" and "roses" -- everything from "antique rose emporium" to "antique china rose".

The key now is to find keywords that people are searching on that do not return many web pages on a search. There were 25 searches for "antique china rose" done in December 2002, but a search on Yahoo returns 90,000 pages -- an enormous amount of pages for something so specific and infrequently searched. A check on "antique croscill rose" shows that 129 people searched for that set of keywords in December, and a search of Yahoo shows just 354 web pages. In this case, we have a fair chance of being listed on the first page with a little more work. Unfortunately, if you're in the flower business, Croscill, is a manufacturer and they sell a product under the name of "Antique Rose" -- not roses. If this sounds like a lot of work, it most certainly is, but we never said that this was easy.

3) Create a good title and description.

Be sure to write a well worded title and description, as this is what will appear in your search engine listing. The title of your web page should also include your keywords. The title and headline are both highly used to determine relevance for your web page. You should copy the title of your web page and include it at the start of the body of your web page using the HTML headline tags; <H1>, <H2>, or <H3> seem to be most recognized. Please keep in mind that not all search engines use meta tags, so it is important to know that the first 200 words of your document may appear as the description. The search engines also rank based on the percentage of people that view your listing and click-through. If 9 out of 10 people that saw your listing, clicked on it, then you will have a greater relevance associated with your listing. A good way to increase click-throughs would be to offer something special for clicking your listing -- a 20% discount or a free widget.

4) Use your keywords frequently.

Well, now that you've determined what specific keywords you're going to use -- ones that will provide you with the most traffic and with few enough web page results; so that you'll have a chance at being listed on the first page of results. The next key is to use those selected keywords frequently on your web page. You'll need to dedicate a web page to discussing the specific topic under which the keywords are relevant. The search engines will decide where to place your web page based on three major things:

1) Topic relevance to the keywords searched
2) Link reference (Other websites that link to your page)
3) Number of people actually clicking on your listing

Your web page should be close to five hundred (500) words talking about and using those keywords. In a 500 word page, you should use each keyword close to 40 times within that page. The more they appear within your web page the more relevant to the keywords searched the search engine will believe that the page actually is and will place it higher.

The way search engines work will most likely change in the future, but keep one thing in mind. They will be focused on providing results that are relevant to what the user is searching for, so as long as your web page has information relevant to the keywords you have selected, your web page will always receive good placement.

5) Make sure the pages are linked.

The search engines will consider your web page more relevant if it can be found independent of a submission. Make sure that your home page has links to all of your pages so that the search engines can find those pages independent of your submissions. Make sure the links are HTML links and not Javascript links, as search engines will ignore Javascript links.

6) Name your web page correctly.

You should use your keywords in the name of your web page. For example, if your keywords for your page were antique, rose, and flowers; then you would name your HTML file antique_rose_flowers.htm. This is very important, as the search engines also use the URL address to determine keyword relevance.

7) Make your web page search engine friendly.

The search engines will practically ignore any URL that does a redirect or forward, so if you're using a domain forwarding service, you'll probably not be listed on many engines.

Avoid the use of frames in your web pages, as the search engine will typically not find the actual web page that contains all your content that you worked so hard to put together.

8) Validate your web pages.

You must make sure that all of the web pages that you want to submit contain valid HTML code. You may be aware that all website pages are made up of HTML code but what you may not be aware of is that often the code that is generated by most web publishing programs creates some errors. There are many search engines that will not accept web pages that contain errors -- this is a big mistake that some web sites make. Also, some alternate web browsers, like Netscape, may not display the page correctly if the page has errors. It is important to remember that most web publishing programs do not actually generate error-free HTML4 code.

The organization that created the HTML specification hosts a website that you may use free-of-charge to validate all of your web pages. This service is available at validator.w3.org. You will need to insure that each of your web pages has the following as the first line in your web page before using this service:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

This validator will provide you with details of the errors, which line of your HTML source code that the error is on, and a copy of your HTML source code displayed on their site. They also provide excellent documentation on the HTML4 specification at www.w3.org/TR/html401/.

If you don't wish to make these changes yourself, you can have any web pages that contain errors corrected by one of the specialists at Mecca Hosting for the cost of $15USD per page.

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