~~~High Search Engine Rankings~~~
From: Scott Rubel
Do the engines read the text we put UNDER the picture? I am referring
to the text that often is limited to just a title of the picture that
you see flash or linger on the screen in the table where the picture
is about to load.
A more important question, perhaps:
In your 11/23 article "Submitting to Directories", you say "To be safe, a
good rule of thumb is to use your company name or the official name of
your Web site."
Yet, in [your article] "All About Title Tags", you say "Many site
owners mistakenly believe they should put their company names in this
tag. This is only a good idea if you are a well-known company...." In
this article you talk about word repetition in the title tag and
putting more keywords in. Does this seeming contradiction mean that
if you optimize your site for the directories, it will not do as well
in automatic search engines? If this is the case, we have to decide
which will get us found more often.
Scott Rubel
Fine Paper Co.
InviteSite.com
111 E. Union St.
Pasadena, CA 91103
~~~Jill's Response~~~
Scott,
Two good questions! I believe in your first question, you are
referring to the image "Alt Tag." Some search engines do read Alt
Tags, and some don't. Alt Tags were designed to enable people who
surfed with their images turned off (less and less people these days)
to be able to "see" what a particular graphic showed. Webmasters are
supposed to describe the graphic using the Alt Tag. It is my
understanding that Alt Tags are also read out loud by text readers for
the blind so that they will not miss out on important navigational
buttons and the like. Because some search engines do read this tag,
and do give some weight to the words placed in them, it can sometimes
help your rankings to use important keyword phrases in this tag where
appropriate.
As to your second question, regarding Titles...there is actually no
contradiction going on at all. What is confusing you is the word
"Title" being used to describe two completely different animals.
Directory submissions and Search Engine submissions are two totally
different processes. This may also confuse others, so let's take a
moment to review the differences.
Directories such as Yahoo!, DMOZ and LookSmart, make you submit all
the information about your site, including its URL, Title and brief
description, using their special submit form. From the information
you provide on this form, their human editors make the final decision
on how your site gets listed in their Directory. On the other hand,
Search Engines such as AltaVista, Google, and HotBot have you submit
*only* your Web site address (URL). Using the URL only, their
automatic robotic spiders go to work "reading" your site and gobbling
up the pertinent information that it naturally supplies.
In your first example from my "Submitting to Directories" article,
when I talked about the "Title," I was referring to the information
you actually enter on the Directory's submittal form in the "Title"
field (or "Name of Web site" field). Remember that the tags and HTML
code on your actual Web site is fairly irrelevant to Directory
editors. It's the information you submit on their form that they use
to decide how to add your site to their database. As my article
states, you absolutely MUST use your company or Web site name for most
Directory submission forms, or there's a good chance you won't get
listed. It would be a lot easier to get high rankings if you *could*
use keywords in the Directory Title field, but unfortunately, in most
instances, you can't. The reason is that Directories want some sort
of consistency in their listings, and we can't really blame them for
that.
In your second example, regarding my "All About Title Tags" article,
the word "Title" refers ONLY to the information that you put in your
tag in your *actual* Web page HTML code. This has
nothing to do with what you submit to a Directory, but has everything
to do with how your site will be ranked by the spidering Search
Engines. In this tag it's important NOT to waste space with company
names that no one has ever heard of, and instead use your most
important and descriptive keyword phrases.
So you see, Directory Titles and the Title in your HTML code of your
page DO NOT need to match, and in most cases, should NOT match. Two
different animals, yet both equally important for high rankings. Hope
this clears up any confusion!
- Jill
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