~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Eugene Cantera
Jill,
We are new to the web and e-commerce and although we are not ready to
drive thousands to our site, it is up and functional and we believe
it's time to get the word out. We are a niche market in music
education for enthusiasts and educators of all ages. We recently were
told that in order to rank high we must continually re-submit our site
monthly to keep us coming up in the top ten. It makes sense to me,
but I wanted to check with an expert.
What's with Yahoo!..lol, they seem to be totally different than other
engines in protocol.
Thanks for your help,
Eugene Cantera
Director of Research and Public Relations
The Dallas School of Music, Inc. / MusickEd.com
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Eugene,
Whoever told you that you must constantly resubmit your site monthly
in order to rank high, deserves to be put out in the stocks for a
public flogging! What they have told you, is in reality the worst
advice that anyone could give you regarding search engine
optimization.
There are numerous reasons why this is terrible advice:
1. If your site isn't optimized for high rankings, i.e., has a
graphical splash page with no text, doesn't focus on keyword phrases
in the text, and/or the titles and meta tags are not jibing with the
visible text on the page, then no amount of submitting to engines will
bring your ranking up, period. It's not the submission process that
gets you rankings. It's having a site with lots of great content that
brings in the rankings. (This is especially true for the main page.)
2. Submitting pages that are already in an engine's database (and that
have not been significantly changed since their original submission),
can be viewed unfavorably by the engines. This could serve to hurt a
page that might otherwise do well in the engines.
It takes a long time for many engines to index your site's pages. BE
PATIENT! For an overview on the approximate times it takes for the
major search engines to index a site after submission, please see our
previous discussion on this topic in Rank Write Issue 004:
http://www.rankwrite.com/archives/issue004.htm.
As for your question about Yahoo!, you are right, they are not like
other engines. That is because they are not a search engine. They
are a directory. They do not spider the information on your site to
determine rankings. Human editors take the information you provide on
your submittal form, look at your site, and use these things to
edit/create your site description. Whatever they use as your
description, is what you're pretty much stuck with, unless it's
inaccurate.
My next Workz.com article will be discussing the best ways to submit
to Internet Directories such as Yahoo!, LookSmart, Go Directory, DMOZ,
and NBCi (formerly Snap). I'll be sure to let you all know when it's
ready for prime time.
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!
