~~~Search Engine Optimization~~~
From: Ayman Trabulsi
Hi, Jill and Heather,
I think I'm lucky I could find your site, and subscribed to your
RoundTable mailing list. The unique and lovely way of communicating
with your readers encouraged me to seek your generosity for a few
questions.
I'm working now on my website design, and hope it'll be on in a couple
of months. I've read some of your articles and past email discussions.
Three points weren't clear to me.
1. You say that keyword Meta tags should be separated by commas, NO
spaces. But in my research, when I "view source" of the sites that
come on top in ANY search query, in ANY search engine, I find that ALL
of them use commas AND spaces to separate their keyword Meta tags. How
do you explain this?
2. You also say that some search engines, Altavista as I remember,
allow me to submit up to 5 URLs. Does this mean that there is a
limitation to the number of webpages that could be submitted to the
search engines? Can't I submit TENS of my pages if I don't want to
wait for them to be spidered?
3. I understood from your articles, that frequent submission might
hurt my website. Well, in fact, my plan was to do it myself first.
Then, if the results were not to my satisfaction, I would hire an
expert to implement the necessary amendments, and resubmit the pages.
Would it work this way or still such a thing, this resubmission, might
hurt my site?
Thank you in advance. Please excuse my language since English is not
my mother tongue.
Best regards,
Ayman Trabulsi
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Ayman,
Thanks for your kind words about Rank Write. I do believe that our
"unique and lovely way of communicating" is definitely our greatest
asset, and one of the reasons our subscriber base has grown as quickly
as it has. (We've past the 7500 subscriber mark this week!)
On to your questions, which I'll take one at a time.
1. The age-old commas and spaces Meta tag debate.
Yes, it is true that when you view the source code for high-ranking
sites, you will see that many have commas and spaces in their Meta
keyword tag. It is absolutely fine to do it this way. You can also
do them with a comma and no space, and with no commas at all. I
happen to prefer the comma with no space method, since it's what I'm
used to using. Whichever way you do them will have no effect on your
rankings, in my opinion. The reason I used to suggest a comma and no
space was because it was a way you could get more words into your
limited amount of Meta tag space. Traditionally, you wouldn't want to
go over 1000 characters for this tag. A space counts as a character,
so if you were worried about how many characters you are putting in
this tag, you can conserve characters this way. But like I said, it
makes no difference either way. Currently only AltaVista and Inktomi
look at this tag, and they don't place much emphasis on its content
when determining rankings. For this reason, I don't even use this tag
on most of my own Web sites any more. A rule of thumb for the Meta
keyword tag is not to spend any time worrying or obsessing about it,
and only spend minimal time creating it.
2. How many URLs can you submit a day?
Submitting to spidering search engines used to be much more of a chore
than it is these days. Now, submitting is not a major part of an
SEO/Webmaster's job. The search engines that matter will almost
always find your site on their own. If your site is linked from
another site in their database, i.e., Yahoo, DMOZ, LookSmart, or any
site at all, Google and even Inktomi will find it and spider it. You
can submit your site to Google's "Add URL" page, as many times as
you'd like, however, it probably won't speed up anything for you.
According to their documentation, they will not penalize you for over
submitting. They do mention that your time would be better spent
improving the content and links of your site, and I'd certainly agree
with them there!
It's true that AltaVista allows you to submit only up to five URLs a
day for free. However, when you submit the free way, it really
doesn't matter how many URLs a day you submit to them; if the recent
past is any indication, you probably won't see any of them in their
index for a very long time. If you care whether or not you're in
AltaVista's database, you can submit through their Express Inclusion
program and submit up to 500 URL's a day. You can even submit more
than 500 pages by joining their Trusted Feed Program. I personally do
not feel that AV provides enough quality referrals to join these
programs at this time, although I'm sure others would beg to differ.
3. Frequent Submitting and Resubmitting
As I mentioned in the last answer, important engines such as Google
and Inktomi will usually find your pages on their own. However, if
you've just made changes, it will not hurt to submit to either of
those engines. To be sure you're listed in the Inktomi database, you
can join their Paid Inclusion program through an Inktomi partner
company like Position Technologies.
Being included through that program ensures that your submitted URLs
will be respidered every 48 hours. This way you can make changes to
your heart's content and never have to resubmit the pages. Even
without their Paid Inclusion program your pages can still get into the
Inktomi database; however, like AltaVista, it can be slow going and is
not guaranteed.
With Google, they generally refresh their index each month. So if you
have a URL that you've already made changes to in their database, rest
assured that it will be refreshed in the next big re-indexing. Google
is also spidering and indexing many URLs on a more frequent basis
these days, as evidenced by the Fresh label, which we talked briefly
about in Issue 072. If your page
has a decent PageRank (I'm thinking perhaps five and up), you may be
spidered every few days. The beauty of this is you don't even have to
pay for inclusion! (Quick additional note about the "fresh" tag: It
appears as if any site can be labeled fresh, and it simply means that
the fresh URL has been spidered/added on the fresh date. It doesn't
necessarily mean that the page itself has been changed.)
A few things to remember in all of this talk about submitting to the
search engines:
Resubmitting a page to any search engine when that page hasn't changed
will absolutely, positively NOT change its rankings. Don't waste your
time or money on programs or services that resubmit your site on a
regular basis. The only things that will change your rankings are
changing the information and/or the coding on your pages, and
acquiring more outside links that point to your site.
You really only need to concentrate your efforts on human-edited
directory listings such as Yahoo, LookSmart and DMOZ, plus the
spidering Google, Inktomi and I suppose, AllTheWeb/FAST. These
databases will also keep you covered in the important Web portal sites
such as MSN and AOL. If you're in the UK, you'll also need to put
some effort into Lycos UK since it's very
popular there. Be aware though, Lycos UK has joined the bandwagon and
recently instituted a "Fast Include" program, for a price of course
(£69 pa)!
Jill
~~~Send Us Your Questions~~~
If you have questions about online copywriting or search engine optimization (or both!), just zip us an email to questions@rankwrite.com. We've had some folks ask if their question
was "too basic" to be printed - and you don't have to worry about
that! There are no "stupid" search engine optimization or copywriting
questions, so ask away!
