Keywords

BEFORE you design your website, make a list of every possible "search" word and phrase that your potential customers might use when looking for your information, product or service. These are known as "KEYWORDS", and the search engines rely heavily on them to return relevant lists of sites when queried.

Look for words relating to your product or service. This will be your primary concern when trying to position you site.

Also look for words relating to Region, State and/or City. Although this will be of secondary concern, it is still a good way to attract customers who choose their sites by area as well as product or service.

Once you have made your list, use these "search" words and phrases to find your competition on the "Big Eight" search engines.

Here they are: (in alphabetical order)

#1. Alta Vista ---- http://www.altavista.com

#2. Excite -------- http://www.excite.com

#3. HotBot -------- http://www.hotbot.com

#4. Info Seek ----- http://www.infoseek.com

#5. Lycos --------- http://www.lycos.com

#6. Open Text ----- http://www.opentext.com

#7. Web Crawler --- http://www.webcrawler.com

#8. Yahoo --------- http://www.yahoo.com

Now that you know where to look, find your competitors whose websites come up in the top ten in searches of each of your KEYWORDS and KEY PHRASES.

Once you find who you will be competing with for the Top Ten positions in your "keyword" search, scour THEIR webpages for more "search" words that you may have overlooked. BUT... Only look for KEYWORDS at this point!

Remember: If you want to be in the "Top Ten" of a search engine, find out who IS in the Top Ten on that search engine, and then beat them at their own game!

Now let's focus on how to use these "keywords" in a conventionally acceptable way that will work with almost every search engine.

Simply put, you MUST work these keywords into the text of your opening "Homepage" as frequently as is possible. For example, if your service or offering is "location" sensitive, then be sure to mention the location in the body text at every opportunity... For example; If your "Real Estate Company" is in "Clinton"... a "normal" sentence might read:

"Townsend Real Estate has been serving clients since 1974...."

A better sentence would be...

"Townsend Real Estate has been serving clients in Clinton, Missouri, since 1974...."

Even if the reader already knows it is in "Clinton, Missouri", you need to repeat the KEYWORDS Clinton and Missouri as many times as possible throughout the body text, without sounding too redundant.

Let me give you an example of KEYWORDS used in one of some websites. This page, by the way, is #1 out of 2,088,538 in a search for the KEYWORDS "native american bows" on Infoseek!! That's what I call TOP POSITIONING! You can do the same... By the time you finish reading this page you will understand the technique used to put this page number one out of 2 million!!

If you pull up this page on Infoseek, or by its web address:

-- http://www.ozarks.net/wilderrv/NAinfos1.htm --

As you look at the page, it seems like a normal page... To the untrained eye. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you'll notice some barely visible text. (And I do mean BARELY!!) This is called "Spamdexing". That means you are loading the page with KEYWORDS in a manner that fools the search engine's computer into thinking your page is more relevant than the other competing websites.

If you position your cursor at the top left of the barely visible text, and as you press and hold your right mouse button, slowly move the cursor down the page. You will highlight the hidden text, making it more readable. It reads as follows:

The HTML code reads something like this: <font color="F2DDB7" size="1">keywords</font>

It repeats this group of KEYWORDS over and over. By being placed at the bottom of the page, they are placed into an area of the page that is rarely even glanced at by a human eye. Even in the remote case that someone looks that low on the opening page... So what? The text is barely visible.

In many cases you can choose to make the test completely invisible. How do you do this? Simply by making the text the same color as the background. Simple! In the case of our "Native American Bow" page, the background was a pattern and not a solid color. This makes it harder to camouflage the KEYWORDS, but the color is so close that it doesn't matter.

But wait... Don't stop there! The website also offers stone knives. Go ahead, enter a search in Infoseek for "stone knives". WOW! It happened again... maybe this isn't coincidence after all! That's right #1 out of 353,297 possibilities! Now try "native american lances", or any of the other things he makes... You guessed it. We're number 1, or very close to it in any keyword search that relates to our products.

Now, That's TOP PLACEMENT!!!

Note: We have found that by using a small "heading" <h6>, rather than a very small print size <font size="1">, most search engines will give more favorable placement, especially if the heading print (whether visible or invisible) is at the top of the page. In the example above the KEYWORDS were added at the end of the page. This is known as "tail-tagging".

Not all the search engines, or all the categories can yield that great of results with only one technique... But sometimes it is that easy! In many cases a simple page, loaded with NON-INVISIBLE KEYWORDS simply appearing frequently in the body text of a short opening page will give similar results. Just how much "Spamdexing" you use is up to you.

Some search engines will favorably place repeating "keyword text" and some search engines will ignore it or, worse, penalize you for it. You simply need to know what to use, and when to use it. We will outline each of the "Big Eight" search engines in the following chapters. All you will need to do is to duplicate the techniques used in each case.

In a page loaded with invisible text, or KEYWORDS a human quality control inspector might, and probably would object to a massive amount of repeated KEYWORDS. But, rarely do the inspectors spoil the party. there are just too many listings to go through with a fine tooth comb. All they do is briefly glance at the page or the HTML code looking for obvious "tricks". When you consider that each of the "Big Eight" contain tens of millions of listings, you begin to understand how hard it is to stop someone who knows the system.

Here is a word of caution. You are taking a chance of being penalized or even removed from a search engine if you repeat the main KEYWORD phrase more than SEVEN times. Research has shown that many search engines are programmed to ignore or even penalize keyword text that is repeated more that SEVEN times within a tagged section of your page. As long as you stay within these parameters your chances of getting penalized are extremely low. We feel that the over use of "Spamdexing" is sometimes unethical, especially when non relevant KEYWORDS are used. You have to be the judge of just how much you use. Remember, the survival of your site can depend on your use of this information in an acceptable manner.

Lets go over invisible text once more to be sure you have the concept down. For example: If the font color (white) matches the background (white) and is therefore "invisible"... AND, the <h6> tag makes the text an extremely tiny HEADLINE. We have found that most search engines give preference to keyword text that is found within HEADLINE tags. This is more effective than "small print" such as <font size=1></font>.

It can also be beneficial to have "keyword text" appear on your web page BEFORE your images... because search engines don't care about images. They're looking for TEXT. Although Images may look nice at the top of your page, they do NOTHING for you in regards to being found on the search engines. Here you have the perfect solution. You can "hide" meaningful text before your image and still have your logo "appear" to be at the top of your web page.

Therefore, be sure to "Headline" your page with TEXT that the search engines can recognize as relevant to what your are offering... AND do it early in your page BEFORE the images... and then often throughout the remainder of your web page text.

It doesn't matter how eloquent you are with your KEYWORD sentences... that is because your site visitor will not actually SEE this text remember, it is invisible. It is designed to be seen by the search engines, without getting you penalized by them.

You may want to alternate between capitalized words and non-capitalized words. That is because some search engines DO differentiate slightly between the two (even though they may claim not to).

Remember, it is through KEYWORDS and KEY PHRASES that people will find you on the Internet.