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by Chris Drew
copyright '98To promote your website and get your greatest share of traffic from search engines you must select and use keywords effectively. Keywords are descriptive words that identify the important content of your website.
Different search engines analyze websites differently. Some look for meta tags listing keywords and a site description in the head section of the web page. Most check the title and many check the text in the early sentences or paragraphs of the page for keywords. Alta Vista checks all text anywhere in your site. They weigh each of these differently according to their unique formulas. "Stop words" like the, of, on, in, and, then, at, etc. are ignored. The search engines compare your keywords with those people search for to rank your site for their visitors. To score in the top 10-30 sites on any keyword you must beat out other sites world wide. Most people do not search more than 20-50 sites of those offered. You will rarely be found if you fall outside the first hundred sites listed.
In the early days (you know - three years ago) you could repeat your keywords one hundred times on your site in the same color as your background to gain top positioning. This is called "keyword spamming" and will get your site banned from search engines today. How, then, can we rise in the battle of the keywords to the top of search engine lists?
The answer is to carefully and creatively select a long list of relevant keywords that accurately reflects your site's content and use them strategically in your site's title, meta tags, headlines and text.
Does your site have content? Content is why people search on the Internet. What do you have that people want to know about? What is it that people need from your site? Why should they return?
To chose your keywords, list all the words that describe the content of your site. Use a thesaurus. Include 2-3 word phrases. Think like someone trying to search for a site like yours. Wouldn't it be nice if you could know how often others actually used the keywords you selected? You can. The search engine at www.goto.com provides a service showing you how often people using their search engine used any given keyword. GoTo is selling top positioning on keywords at its search engine. They think this is a brilliant idea whose time has come. Not being rich, I disagree but recognize the advantage of using their system to better position my site on other search engines. Deep in their site, where they sell their keywords, is a link to a script that will let you see how often the keyword you type in has been searched on recently.
It is a study in the way many people search the web. At their homepage click on the yellow triangle in the upper right hand corner where you see "About GoTo". Next click on #3, "Advertise and Get Listed". Then click on #2 - "Get Listed on GoTo". Scroll down about two-thirds of the page past the bull to where they are asking you to bid on a keyword. Click on the link there asking you "Want a suggestion?... " Click there and a window will open that allows you to type in a keyword and receive back a list of words and phrases with their recent frequencies of use.
This will tell you which words and combinations are frequently searched on and which are losers. Plug in all the words you dreamed up. Look in the results for other words you did not think of. Out of this - you will find a list of keywords that will bring the largest number of interested people to your site. Resist the temptation to add words that do not relate just because they are often used. If someone is looking for sex they are not going to visit your site if it does not promise and deliver the same. You need the people who want what it is you have. Give them the clues they are searching on.
Now that you have your keywords, here is how to use them in a web page. Include them in your web page titles as below:
<HTML≷
<HEAD>
<TITLE> "Art of the T-shirt" - Annual Chicago T-shirt Art Exhibit Series</TITLE>
Include them in your description Meta Tag as below.
<META name="description" content="Artists - find web site promotion tools and small art agency discussion group here. The ART OF THE T-SHIRT is an annual exhibit of wearable art sponsored by Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center, a non-profit community art center in Chicago's most diverse inner-city community - Uptown. " >
Include them in total in your keyword Meta Tag. Use only a comma (no space) to separate words and phrases.
<META name="keywords" content=" Chicago,chicago,windy city,windy city arts,chicago tourism,chicago art,...... artists,urban planning,urban diversity,art policy">
You can edit and use the tags above by simply substituting your description and keywords between parentheses after the content= in the Description and Keyword Meta Tags. Enclose your keywords and description in quotes.
I also recommend including keywords in alt attributes in your image tags. What is an image tag? It is a tag that identifies the images in your website. If you use a modern HTML software that writes your code for you, be bold enough to try understanding a little HTML code. After a while much of it will become easy to read.
This is an image statement:
<img src="pics/t_art40b.gif" align="left" height=72 width=72 alt="t-shirt, PR, pointer 40b">
Notice first is the path and file name of the graphic (pics/t_art40b.gif). Then there are height and width arguments. Finally comes an "alt" argument. The words in the alt argument are seen when a visitor can not see the image because his/her browser is old or because they are surfing with graphics turned off to increase the speed for slow hardware. Search engines read alt tags and if you have a lot of graphics they are your best bet to position keywords where a search engine will read them and rank your site higher because of it.
Page Mill and Frontpage will not add alt arguments unless you have told them to. Find the image statements in your web pages and add alt arguments with your keywords inside quotes. Relate your keywords to the page content and when possible to the image, as well. Don't repeat the same keyword more then 7 times on a page without great reason as beyond seven times looks like spam to some search engines.
Now review your site and rewrite portions substituting your best keywords in places where they fit without harming your content and style.
Your site is now ready to climb in the search engine charts. The search engine robots continually search the sites in their lists. In several weeks or a month your new keywords will begin to effect your rankings. Do not register your site twice with the same search engine unless it is a directory and is encouraged or unless some time has passed and your are not listed.
If you want more information on particular search engines visit VirtualPromote.com and go to their Search Engine Forum. Also check out the Search Engine Report. It keeps you informed of general search engine news useful to web developers and search engine users. And check out our Promote Page for links to many other useful site in building and promoting your site. Every 2nd Saturday of the month we host a Website Marketing SIG from 1-3pm in our community computer lab and T-shirt art gallery at 1630 W. Wilson Avenue in the American Indian Center. Stop by to see how well computers and creativity can live together.
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SEND QUESTIONS ON THIS ARTICLE TO umcac@art-teez.org
This is the first in a series of articles paralleling our Website Marketing SIG topics. In these writings I will explain the terminology and basic HTML codes to familiarize the beginner with the tools they need to manage their websites (present or future). I will attempt to include a tip or two for the advanced student of the art, as well.
The way to get your site to appear high in the search engine rankings is to make good use of the "keywords" that reflect your site's content. Keywords are those words you think others looking for your content (the valuable information on your site that attracts a person to it) - would plug into search engines. What is the content of your site?
If you are only now thinking of designing a website, ask yourself what is your purpose for building a site. Is it to promote yourself, or a product, or to have fun? If you want people to visit your site and return, you must also think about what other people, your audience, are searching for and how you can provide them with what they want. How can you keep them interested? How you answer these questions determines your content and your keywords.
Our non-profit art center wants to sell t-shirt art eventually. We want to serve artists' needs and promote discussion of community art issues. Our keywords include t-shirt art, fashion, artists, Chicago artists, art policy, and diversity, among others. If you have a site, you may already have selected a series of keywords to define it. If not, refer to the "Selecting and Using Keywords" article archived at
http://www.art-teez.org/school.htm
Each unique page on your site that you want to register on the search engines should have its own unique mix of keywords that reflects its most attractive content.
Your next step is to use your chosen keywords in your site design. As a designer of web pages you will use your keywords in meta tags, titles, headings, alt arguments and body text to structure your site to rank high in search engine listings.
Every web page has a head and body. The title and meta tags are in the head. What you see on your monitor when you browse the web, the text and HTML coding that defines the page layout and links of a page, is in the Body. There are 7 levels of headline codes from the largest <H1> to the smallest <H7> in HTML. Alt arguments (for alternate) are found in the code strings that tell the browser where to find images (graphic files) and how to display them. The Alt argument is the part of the image tag that tells people who use old text-only browsers what the picture they can't see on their screen is about. It contains a short phrase.
HTML codes appear inside < >, like &st;html>, the code that starts out every page to confirm to a browser accessing it that the page is, indeed, an HTML document. Codes generally appear in on/off pairs. For example the last code on the page is </HTML>. The off form of a code has a forward slash in front. Another code pair is <head>, that indicates the start of the head section of the page, and </head> that indicates the end of the head section. The head gives the visiting browsers and search engines information about the site and its content. Most important is the title. <title>Your page title goes here</title>, or <TITLE>t-shirt art - diversity - Chicago artists</title> are examples of title statements. All search engines look at the title of a page for keywords by which to rank the page for their users. Most give greater weight to it then keywords found elsewhere.
Also found in the head are two types of meta tags that help you promote your site to search engines. The keyword meta tag, <META name="keywords" content="your selected keywords go here">, and the description meta tag, <meta name="description" content="the description of your site goes here">, are used by many (but not all) search engines for keywords and some use your description meta tag to make up the summary included with your URL when they list your site in their search results. Alta Vista only "indexes" the first 1024 characters in your keyword and description meta tags. That is a little more than 150 words.
After the head comes the body, <body>. Following this code is everything you want to share on the world wide web. When you are finished add the </body> (turn off the body code) and then </html> to tell browsers "the end". For more on HTML visit http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/
This is all you need to know to understand how to build your site to rank high on Alta Vista, the third most important search engine on the Internet. Many millions of people visit Alta Vista every month. A high rank in the top ten sites on a popular keyword will bring visitors (traffic) to your site.
Search Engines send spiders to visit your site. A spider is a program that visits your site and collects keywords from your pages. They assign more or less importance to words depending on where they occur (meta tag, title, body text). Each search engine has a different formula to decide how to rank the keywords it "indexes" (collects) from your site. To register your site go to Alta Vista, www.altavista.com, scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on the small type "add URL". You will go to instructions and a short form. When registering your site be ready to give your URL, e-mail address, name and a short two line description (25 words or less) on the sites content.
Alta Vista brags about being able to copy and keep track of every word on the World Wide Web. Their formula (algorithm) relies less on the keywords it finds in the meta tags in the Head of your page than on the repetitions of the keywords in your title, in your meta tags, and in your body text often with emphasis on the first few paragraphs. Other search engines that are not as fast rely more on your meta tags, title and the first words on your page. Repeating keywords in these positions is effective. Alta Vista compares the keywords in the title with keywords in the early body text of your page to rank pages.
A word of caution - don't repeat keywords more than normal use would make sense because search engines test pages for "keyword spam" (when a keyword is repeated to excess to rank higher) and will ban your site from their listing if they think you are doing this.
What follows are the opinions of webmasters writing on the subject of Alta Vista in the Search Engine Forums. This valuable site is a must see for anyone designing a site and promoting it on the Internet. Check it out to learn more on your own.
Publius
Titles are the most important followed by RELEVANT keywords and then location/frequency of keywords in the body text. Do not repeat keywords or use keywords that are not found in the body of your document. Order your keywords (in meta tag) from most important to least important..... Put your most important keywords near the top of the page (in the body text). Alta Vista has the habit of showing older documents first and eventually shuffling older documents to the top of the list. Submit only a few pages and wait for their robot (spider) to return and index the rest of your site.
klawncare
Keyword density of page text: approx. 2-3% keyword in Headings, Bold and /or large font (<H1>) ...Keyword in Title and Meta Keyword and Description Tags and Body Text. Alt tags (arguments) don't matter much. Time is an issue. (The longer your page is listed the higher it rises. Although with Alta Vista it is important to repeat the keywords in your title in your description, in the first headline of your page and in your body text.)
Visit http://searchengineforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi to read hundreds of insights into the quirks of search engines by professional webmasters.
If you have questions on any subject mentioned in this article e-mail me at <mailto:umcac@art-teez.org. Next month I will cover Yahoo, the most important directory on the Internet. Our Website Marketing SIG meets every second Saturday from 1-3:00 pm at 1630 W. Wilson in the American Indian Center.
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{NOTE: Although this informal group is not yet officially sanctioned by the CCS Board of Directors, we print their report as being a useful and especially helpful tool for Website novices, as well as being pertinent to the interests of CCS members. CS, Ed.}
This is the second in a series of articles paralleling our informal Website Marketing SIG topics. In these writings I will explain the terminology and basic HTML codes to familiarize the beginner with the tools they need to manage their present or future Websites. Frequently code samples will be introduced in parenthesis. As we go along explanations will be offered as space and subject suggest. I will attempt to include a tip or two for the advanced student of the art, as well.
Yahoo is a directory. Humans make the decisions at Yahoo on how sites are listed. Other search engines use computer programs that make these decisions. They send robot programs, "spiders", over the Internet to collect information about keywords on sites they visit. At Yahoo, human employees review sites that register with them. People judge the sites and decide which to include in Yahoo and under which categories to list them. They can rarely review all the sites given them each week and simply toss out those they do not get to. So, if at first you do not succeed at Yahoo - try again in a week or two.
If you don't understand HTML yet - don't worry - overtime repetition will build familiarity and direct application will improve your grasp of it. The following HTML code examples show how these tags look in your page heads. Your words substitute in between the quotes or the code pairs on your site.
To rank high on other search engine keyword listings, your site must grade well by the formulas the engines use to weigh the keywords in the head and body of your page. Remember every page has a head (<head>....</head>) and following that the body (<body>....</body>). All the text and images displayed by a surfer's browser are in the body while information for browsers and search engines about the page is in its head. Search engines probe the title tag (<title>My Site</title>) and meta tags (<meta name="description" content="Very briefly tells everything in my site" >) in the head. In the body text they often give more weight to the words in the larger headline codes (<h1>Largest Headline</h1> and <h2>Second Largest Headline</h2>). Each engine's formula or algorithm is different and they change from time to time.
None of this is important to Yahoo. Sites that are creative and have lots of original content fair well with humans. Yahoo requires that a site be well built, with links that work and images that download, to get listed. Sites that are poorly built, with lots of typos or misspellings, links that go nowhere and images that do not download fail to impress. Sites which are little more than fluff, depending mostly on links to other sites for interest, are ignored by Yahoo surfers. No notice is given to those whose sites are ignored. Even those whose sites are listed are only occasionally notified. Other search engines using spiders can rank many more sites than Yahoo. However, the lists they make up for searchers from this robotic indexing process include repetition and unrelated sites. Webmasters have learned how to trick the spiders to gain unfair advantage. Yahoo is number one for clean lists and for the traffic that a good listing can bring to your site.
To find the links that do not work anymore on your site, visit our promote page and scroll down to click on the Web Site Garage link. They will test your page and e-mail you a web address where your results reside.
http://www.art-teez.org/pro.htm
In fact, this page is a better page to start your surf on than Netscape or another commercial site. It has links to all of the search engines and important directories. It has links to many of the tools and information sources you need to build and maintain a site. You tell us what we are missing and we will add it! You can even have our t-shirt art pointers to index finger your wit on your site. These small gif graphics of invisible everyday people wearing t-shirts lead the eye with humor. They are free for non-commercial use. Or go directly to www.websitegarage.com. Next month I will explain how to troubleshoot an image tag to let you know some common errors that prevent graphics from appearing.
For Yahoo, download time is important. Busy reviewers are not happy waiting for a site with large graphics on a page to download. Neither is anyone else! Put large graphics on their own page and learn how to reduce graphic file sizes. I have developed "tours" on my site. A tour is a photo essay that a person takes by clicking on a link. This brings up the first photo with a sentence or two. The text loads first for the viewer to read while the photo fills in. At the end of the text is the link to the next photo in the essay. The viewer can go back to the page they started the tour on at any point along the way. Each page downloads fast. The viewer is kept interested and is not trapped by a long download. My tours have between 6-12 photos. Yet, no one has to wait long because I use black and white jpeg files which are very small at 72 pixels per inch (same as dots per inch - dpi). Printers commonly print graphics at 300-600 dpi while the highest resolution a computer monitor can display is 72 pixels per inch. A graphic resolution greater than 72ppi will only increase download time.
Next in importance to Yahoo reviewers is content. If your site is just a collection of links to other sites it will not impress most Yahoo reviewers. What is unique about your site? What do you offer someone that they cannot find as well done on another site that is already listed? Why should a person return to your site? Remember, a human - blurry-eyed and unimpressed with the same old tricks - is reviewing your site. Put your content up front. Then, you stand a greater chance of getting listed in Yahoo.
Simple HTML code that works with the early versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer and with other popular browsers is best. The latest versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer are famous for offering you advanced code techniques but only people with the same browser and version as you will see the results. Avoid using the latest features when they depend on the latest HTML code that is not supported by most browsers. If it is truly needed, isolate it to pages after the homepage. In my opinion, smart design employs basic universal HTML without frames and uses graphics with fast download times especially on your homepage. Your site will be accessible to all.
To register your site in Yahoo you first need to research Yahoo's categories to find the directories your site belongs in and to select the most important directory in which register. When you visit Yahoo you see, below their many diversions, their 14 top domain (category) choices. If your site sells anything, you must register it in a category somewhere under the top domain of "Business & Economy". The reviewer will then cross-register in other logical categories. If you give him/her sensible alternative categories the reviewer will often follow your requests. If you don't register in a logical category you will not be listed at all. If you don't know what other categories in which you should also be listed, it is harder to make changes later. Remember, Yahoo employees never finish their listing work so less important corrections to already listed sites receive even less priority. Get it right the first time.
Prepare a 25 word (or less) description of your site without sales hype like "the lowest prices... " etc. Reviewers don't list sites with hype in their descriptions. Just include what people can find of value on your site. It must read well because this will be all people see about your site in Yahoo's listings. Once you begin the registration process you will be asked to provide other categories under which you feel your site should appear. You will have a chance to suggest new categories that Yahoo could add that your site would fit under. This is your best chance to achieve the result you desire. Be prepared! Research all the categories that apply before you begin and write down new categories that you think of while researching.
You need to keep track of the path to the sub-categories you find which are locations in which you would like to see your site listed. A typical category path looks like this - "Arts & Humanities:Visual Arts:Computer Generated:Graphics". This path indicates three clicks to the level where the site URLs listed out-number the categories listed. This is the level at which you can consider registering your site. You may want to save the category path so when you register elsewhere you can offer this path as an additional category relating to your site's content. Often times you will click on a category name followed by an @ sign. It will lead you to a totally different path. To confirm the real path for the category you are in, refer to the upper left hand corner of the category page. This is where the path is listed in Yahoo category pages.
When you get down to the level where you see sites listed with the categories you can begin to consider registering your site from there. Continue to follow as many leads from the top domains as you can find time for because the more good categories you find that apply to your site's content, the better. Once you are through researching you can chose the best category under which to list your site. Go to that category and scroll down to the bottom of the page where you will find a link in small type "Suggest a Site". Click on the link and follow the directions. Your reviewer will know you worked to make their job easier by the alternative sites you suggest when asked for them in the on-line form. Then, if your site has good content and is well built the chances are great it will be listed.
When they list you sometimes they send you e-mail. They may not. But you will have in your research records all the categories you requested listing under. After a week or two you can check to see if you've been listed in any or all of these categories. If not, try again by repeating your registration. If after two more weeks you still are not listed, visit www.gethighforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi and register. Then, scroll down the page to "Site Review Please", click and post a request to have your site reviewed by someone who can tell you what might be it's problem with Yahoo.
Next month I will cover Infoseek as our Website Marketing SIG explores the same topic. It meets every 2nd Saturday (12/12/98) from 1-3:00pm at 1630 West Wilson Avenue in the computer lab of the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center at the American Indian Center. Contact: Chris Drew Ph. 773/561-7676.
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by Chris Drew
copyright '99Infoseek has the third most traffic out of all the search engines. It is famous for its fast page additions to its directory listings. Because of this short time between submission and a site's appearance in Infoseek's listings, webmasters have used Infoseek to see how their pages, and particularly their keyword meta tags will affect their site's rankings. When you register your site you can submit as many as 25 pages of your site in one day during regular business hours M-F. You must wait at least 24 hours before resubmitting pages. Once you have registered your site with a search engine there are several sites that will let you plug in your site's URL to tell you how your site ranks on a selected search engine. For this service visit www.rankthis.com or www.positionagent.com.
Fast listings do not come without a cost. Adult site and other greed inspired operators take advantage of Infoseek's easy registration to spam the listings with mindless excess. Infoseek struck back by banning direct registration from free domains like Geocities or Tripod. These companies offer you free website space in exchange for banner advertising. Some jerks use these free sites to cheat people on the Internet. Sites from these domains can still register by e-mail which gives Infoseek an opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff. Several of the largest service providers are required to register their sites by e-mail as well.
Infoseek uses a spider named Sidewinder to visit the sites that register with it. Sidewinder follows links on the registered sites to new pages and adds new page site listings based on the information it finds. The spider may take two to three months to discover a site on the web by chance. That's why it is best to register your site yourself.
Website design and promotion are related. If your links are broken and your graphics do not work - who will return after a first bad experience? It is valuable to know image tag elements and how to trouble shoot them so that your images appear where and how you want them to.
How do image tags work and what are the common problems you may encounter with them? The basic command looks like this, <img src="pic/t-art.gif">. An image tag tells a visiting browser where a graphic file is located. It explains the path to the graphic file t-art.gif. This is what a link is - a path to a file that any browser can use to locate it. Some files are half way around the world and others are in the next sub-directory. Browsers automatically follow the links in an image tag when downloading a page.
Another kind of link often seen on websites is one you must click different colored type to visit another Internet site. This is created with an "Anchor Hypertext Reference" tag. It starts with an <a href="link path name"> and ends with </a>. An example is <a href="http://www.umcac-art.org">T-shirt Art Exhibits</a>. Can you find the path statement in this link? Can you tell what a visitor will see in their browser's window that they can click?
The "img" tells the browser that this is an image tag. The src="pics/t-art.gif" tells the source or path and the name of the graphic file to be displayed. It is wise to put your graphic files into a sub-directory of the directory where your site's HTML page files are located. If your site fits on a 3.5 floppy you can make a "pics" (or any other name) directory for your gif and jpeg files. The links (paths) to graphics in this sample will be the sub-directory pics/, and the graphic file name, see.gif, to make the image tag <img src="pics/see.gif">.
The path tells where the graphic is in relation to the web page calling it up. If you move the web page files and the sub-directory with the graphic files to any other directory or even to another Internet Service Provider's (ISP) computer, the graphics will still work. If the path from the web page to the graphic files they use changes - the path statement in the image tag must be updated. Unless you love lots of tedious work, don't change the name of the subdirectory where you store your graphic files.
The image tag's "arguments" give details on how to display the graphic file it links to. The most important are alignment, height, width and alt arguments. The height and width arguments tell the size of a graphic image. By putting height and width arguments in your image tag, browsers can define its location immediately without having to wait for it to download. This allows the browser to layout the page and display the type first which gives the viewer something to read while the graphics are downloading.
Images on the Internet are measured in 72nds of an inch. Monitors do not show greater detail than a 72nd of an inch. The speed a page downloads is of top priority to many a person viewing a site. Always use gif and jpeg files with a resolution of 72 pixels per inch. Higher resolutions - such as 300 dots per inch (DPI) used in print documents - result in much larger files sizes which take long to download and give no better image on a monitor screen.
The alignment attribute positions the graphics on the left, center, or right of the screen in line with the type it appears with in the HTML page file. The alt attribute contains the text that explains what the graphic is about for non-graphic browsers and people surfing without downloading graphics for faster viewing.
So an image tag with all these attributes might look like this < image src="pics/t-art.gif" align="center" height=144 width=288 alt="fine art t-shirts">. This tells the path, that the graphic is centered on the screen, its size (144x288 pixels or 2x4") and what it is about, fine art t-shirts, for those using text only browsers.
When troubleshooting problems with image tags it helps to know a little about Unix, the operating system most used on the mid-size computers that are so often used to maintain websites at ISPs. On the Unix operating system the key used to indicate a directory change is the forward slash - the exact opposite from Dos, Windows or Macintosh operating systems. That is why in HTML all your path statements and URL's (Universal Resource Locator or Internet address) use the forward slash to indicate sub-directories.
Another important issue with Unix is case. To Dos, Windows, and Macintosh operating systems case, capitals and small letters, are the same. The files Graphic.gif, GRAPHIC.GIF, and graphic.gif are all the same name to these operating systems. In Unix each of these file names are different. Unix is case sensitive. The problem is that a file named Graphic.gif on a web page opened by a browser on Windows on your machine can call up a graphic file in your pics directory named GRAPHIC.GIF and you will see the graphic on your screen. But upload the same files to your ISP which runs Unix and no graphic image will appear. Why? Because Unix will read Graphic.gif in your image statement path but not recognize GRAPHIC.GIF in your pics subdirectory as Graphic.gif. You need to be very careful about how you type your file names and be consistent about case. The best advise is to not use caps and lower case, but to use all caps or all small letters in naming files for your site.
In Unix every file has permissions that must be set correctly for visitors to access them. Some ISP's take care of this Unix issue for you. If they do not - you will need to learn how to do it in order to upload your files correctly so that people visiting your site do not get an "Access Denied" message or graphics that refuse to appear. This is more complicated and if I get a request from anyone on this subject, I will explain how it works so you can control this facet of site maintenance. Only when your image tags and all other parts of your site work should you consider submitting it for review by others on the Internet who can help you promote your site.
If Infoseek reviews your site it will rank higher on any appropriate keyword search. On Infoseek's homepage are two columns of categories on which you can click to do a Yahoo-type search. Clicking on these will access other category pages. To get reviewed you must first find the Infoseek categories under which your site belongs. Like on Yahoo, you drill down through the category pages to where sites similar to your site are listed. When you have explored all the likely categories under which your site might belong and have selected the three best, you are ready to proceed. Write a short paragraph on why your site is unique and what it will add to the categories under which you want it listed. E-mail this paragraph with your URL requesting review to url_review@infoseek.com.
If at first you do not succeed, work on improving your site and reapply in a few months. Site promotion is an on-going job. Site construction is as well. Keep reading these writings. Explore other sites listed on our Promotion Page. Build your site and promote it over time using the tips you have gathered. Eventually, you will have all the traffic that you can handle.
Next month I will cover Hotbot as our Website Marketing SIG explores the same topic. It meets every 2nd Saturday (2/13/99) from 1-3:00pm at 1630 West Wilson Avenue in the computer lab of the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center at the American Indian Center. Contact: Chris Drew Ph. 773/561-7676.
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All rights reserved © 2001 Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center (UM-CAC). E-mail UM-CAC at umcac@art-teez.org Ph.773/561-7676
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