Website Design and Promotion SIG Report
April 10, 1999

The Website Design and Promotion SIG met on the 1st Saturday of April at the American Indian Center at 1630 W. Wilson Avenue in the art gallery. The meeting opened with the usual question and answer period lead by Chapter Coordinator, Chris Drew. We reviewed the value of knowing the basics of HTML and how to design a site to rank on search engines in response to a question from the audience. A basic knowledge of HTML is valuable even if someone else is hired to maintain the site, and especially if you are the "Webmaster". This SIG covers this basic.

Thomas Williams presented information on how search engines use the text in meta tags, title tags and the body to rank your site in queries served up to searchers. Below is a useful summary of his remarks. Animated discussion followed the presentation. Chris promised a live Internet connection would be available to future presenters. A lab with a variety of browsers installed for attendees to check their own pages on is a future SIG benefit in development. Copies of Chris Drew's "How to Rank on HotBot" were distributed. This article will be posted along with this report on the Uptown Multi-Cultural Art Center's new website at www.art-teez.org/school.htm

The next meeting will be Saturday, May 8 from 1:00 - 3:00 and will explore "How to Rank on Excite". Do you have a website design or promotion topic you wish to know more about or to present to our SIG e-mail us at umcac@art-teez.org - thank you.

PRESENTER April 10, 1999
Thomas Williams

Source of Search Engine search result list record
"Descriptions" and length of "Title"
(all engines take the title from the page's title tag).
Source: Search Engine Watch by Danny Sullivan with my own additions

Search Engine	Length of Title in characters	Source of Description
Alta Vista	78	150 characters from meta tag
Excite	70	395 characters from meta tag
Web Crawler	60	395 characters from meta tag
Hot Bot	115	250 characters from meta tag
Infoseek	90	200 characters from meta tag Virtual Promote says it takes it from the first body text.)
Lycos	60	200 characters from 1st text on page including image ALT text and not including meta tags
Northern Light	74	150 characters first from Title and then from body text, not including ALT text or meta tags

Conclusions and Comments

1. Meta tag comment text for the most part isn't used anymore by search engines in analyzing pages.

2. Don't preface your submissions with "www" unless needed.

3. To keep things neat looking in your pages listings in search engine search result lists:

a. keep Title to within 70 characters in length, put least important characters at end because last 10 characters will be chopped off by Web Crawler.

b. Put the most important part of your Description in the first 150 characters of your meta description tag, additional characters up to a total of 3 95 may be used depending on search engine.

c. know that Lycos will take the Description from the first 200 characters of page text, including ALT text but not other meta tags.

d. Northern Light is really weird - it repeats your Title tag in the Description, then adds text from body text (not including ALT or meta tags) up to a total of 150 characters.

4. Design your pages based on key pages that you intend to submit to search engines (with, of course, these pages linking to other pages in your site). Analyze the key pages' relevancy to specific key words (that your target audience is likely to enter in search engine search boxes) using programs such as WebPosition.

5. Use a search engine and directory submission and position agent service such as Microsoft's Linkexchange network.

6. Participate in banner exchange programs and associate/affiliate programs that fit with your site's product or service. Linkexchange is the biggest banner exchange program (about 200,000 participating sites) and also has an associate/affiliate program. Linkexchange network is a good associate/affiliate program.

7. Subscribe to web promotion discussion lists (select digest format option) such as SearchEngineWatch, Linkexchange and others listed in Virtualpromote.

8. Use a web hosting service that provides good statistics, including full referrer information.