Refresher Topics Keywords

 

Searching for better results: or How to stuff your Competitors.

This page is for the benefit of existing clients, and is intended as a refresher for the training that we provide clients with. This is not a complete tutorial.


A search result from a search engine can, and will produce thousands of similar pages. Nearly always, its only the first 10 results that are shown, these results are deemed the most relevant to your request. In a lot of instances people assume that the search engine has failed by offering up irrelevant or totally bizarre choices: do not assume that the search engine failed, assume that you have asked the wrong question, or did not supply the search engine with enough detailed information. READ THE SEARCH ENGINE'S HELP FILES TO FIND OUT JUST HOW TO PERFORM EFFECTIVE SEARCH’S then hone your request to lessen the amount of irrelevant and unrelated material from your results.

You have refined your search and still get odd results?

If you still want to blame someone else for your useless results and endless dead end trips; then blame the site owners, publishers and all the people whose only purpose in life is to see huge volumes of traffic flow through their sites. The truth of the matter is that every wide boy, box shifter and part time new media marketer has learnt a few simple rules to increase traffic to their sites by supplying misleading and inappropriate tags to their site descriptions: so the search engine has offered you a page that clearly represented itself as a supplier of valuable tax information but in reality it is a seedy sex site intent on pushing porn.

The end result is self defeating, the search engines are wising up to every trick in the book and adapting to the situation but unfortunately the genuine sites are loosing out. Tricks that worked a year ago for genuine sites are being so abused, that now search engines only need to see a few slips of over enthusiastic tagging to eliminate a site for being possibly misleading or inappropriate.

The rules are still there but do deserve more respect than in the earlier years of site submissions; plus there are a lot more sites out there and growing every day.

Now let’s cut to the chase: You are on the internet and want to be in the top 10 for a search relating to you, your hobby or your business. How do you achieve this?

Keywords and how to select them

You have to imagine the words someone will need to enter in a search engine to unearth your pages. Then supply them in a MetaTag format. The use of single words is now less attractive than a few years ago, use phrases more now, as the amount of sites competing for the same audience is so large that the single word approach puts you in a heap that is far larger than the heap containing phrases that fulfils the request more closely.

Example you are a tour company specialising in hill walking in Scotland; keyword "Scottish" 10,000’s of pages, Keyword "Scottish hillwalking tours" 10’s of pages. The choice is clear, you can try to climb to the top of a small hill or struggle to sit at the foot of a huge mountain. I prefer the odds of getting to the top of the smaller obstacle.

Go to our MetaTag area and use our online Tag Generator which will create your most needed Tags and also give you a brief explanation of each Tag's restrictions.

If you have found our explanation for keywords useful, let me know, and if enough people request it I will expand this area to accommodate more descriptions of common pitfalls and their solutions…