I have heard from some sources that the search engines are becoming theme based. Can you tell me what this means?

Arnold Walker


Answer:

Hi Arnold,

A theme based search engine is one which, instead of only looking at the content of individual pages, looks at the content of all the pages in the site. This means that instead of only creating separate optimized pages for your site, each page optimized for one keyword, you also need to optimize all the pages in your site for your target keywords. Here's how you should go about doing it:

The first (and perhaps the most important) step is to ensure that you only select keywords which are related to each other. Don't select keywords which have no relation to each other. To know more about how you should select the appropriate keywords, go to http://www.1stsearchranking.net/keywords.htm. The exact number of keywords that you select doesn't matter, as long as the keywords are related to each other and are applicable for your site.

Then, create the optimized pages for each of the keywords, each page being optimized for one keyword. To learn more about how you can do this, see my article on this topic at http://www.1stsearchranking.net/keyword-rich-pages.htm.

Once you have done that, try to repeat these keywords throughout your site. Try to repeat these keywords in the content of each and every page in your site (including your home page), as long as this repetition makes sense to your human visitors. You also need to repeat the keywords in the Title tag of each of the pages in your site. Since there is a limit to the length of the Title tag that the search engines will accept, what you should do is to select any two keywords from your list of keywords, and put them in the Title tag of one page. Then, select two more keywords from your list, and put them in the Title tag of another page, and so on.

Once you have done this, take a look at all the outgoing links in your site, and see whether your site links to any unrelated site. If it does, if possible, try to remove the links which lead to unrelated sites. After this, submit all the pages in your site to the search engines, at the rate of one page per day. If you want, you can use our free submission tool for this purpose. It is available at http://www.1stsearchranking.net/submission.htm.

Lastly, try to improve the link popularity of your site by getting links from sites which are related to yours. In order to see how you can do that, see my article on this topic at http://www.1stsearchranking.net/link-popularity.htm.


QUESTION 2:

I have an online store which sells hundreds of cosmetics. I have researched some of the keywords that are applicable for my site, and I find that many people, instead of searching for generic cosmetics related keywords, search for the actual brand names of the products that I am selling. These are the people that I want to attract to my site, because, since they know exactly what they want to buy, there is every possibility that they are going to end up buying from my site if I can manage to get them to my site in the first place. Now, with a normal search engine, I can create pages in my site which are optimized for the names of the products that people are searching for, and hence, I can get good rankings in them. However, what I want to do is to get a good ranking for all these keywords in Yahoo!, since Yahoo!, as I understand, is the most popular search engine. However, I have never been able to do this. What am I doing wrong?

Bernard Hamilton


Answer:

Hi Bernard,

Yahoo! is a human-edited directory, not a search engine. The ranking of your site in Yahoo! depends on the Title and Description of the listing of your site in Yahoo! - it does not depend on the actual content of your site.

A listing in Yahoo! tends to be useful for those sites which sell only a couple of products and services. However, more the number of products that you sell, lower will be the usefulness of a listing in Yahoo! for you. The reason is that Yahoo! generally allows only 1 page in your site to be listed, which, in most cases, will be the home page of your site. It will, in most cases, simply not list the internal pages of your site. As I mentioned, your ranking in Yahoo! depends, among other things, on the Title and Description of your site. The Title of your site has to be the official name of your site, and hence, there's not much that you can do about the Title. The Description of your site can't be longer than a few words. Thus, a site which sells only a couple of products can include the names of the products in the Description. However, for a site like yours, which sells hundreds of products, there is simply no way you can include the names of all the products in the Description.

Now, if your site is already listed in Yahoo!'s directory, there's simply nothing much that you can do. You can ask them to change the Description of your site's listing by going to http://add.yahoo.com/fast/change, but you have to be one lucky man to get them to even look at your change request. If they do look at your change request, you need to provide a valid reason why you want the Description changed - if they feel that you are only trying to include some keywords in the Description, they will reject your request for a change.

If your site is not listed already, you can use their $199 Business Express submission to submit your site. Since the Description is limited to a few words, my advice is to select two of the most popular product names that people are searching for, and work them in to your Description. Suppose the names of these two products are Product X and Product Y. Then, here's a Description that you can use: "offers cosmetics like Product X, Product Y, and more." Make sure you feature Product X and Product Y prominently in your home page, so that the Yahoo! editor who evaluates your site comes to know immediately that your site does sell Product X and Product Y.

For the remaining products, my advice is to try and get an excellent ranking in Google for these products, since Yahoo!'s Web Pages section is taken from Google. Also, if someone searches for a product name, and there's no site in Yahoo!'s directory which contains that product name in its Title or Description, then Yahoo! will directly display results from the Web Pages section. If you have a good ranking in Google, you can get a lot of traffic in this way.

To learn more about how you can submit your site to Yahoo!, go to http://www.1stsearchranking.net/yahoo-submission.htm.


QUESTION 3:

Can using FrontPage 2000 to build and publish HTML code cause a site to have a poor search engine ranking? In other words, because FrontPage built pages require special files to be installed on the server (FrontPage server extensions) can these files make search engine robots miss one's meta tags? I had heard this was a problem with FP97. Is it still a problem with FP2000?

Greg Pisch


Answer:

Hi Greg,

Using Frontpage will generally not hurt your rankings in any way, regardless of the version that you use. The only thing that you need to be concerned about is that Frontpage has this irritating habit of not putting the Title tag of your page at the top of the Head section - it often puts the Title tag at the bottom or the middle of the Head section. Now, some search engines may expect the Title tag to be present at the top of the Head section, and hence, if it is not, may think that the page doesn't have a Title tag at all. This would tend to adversely affect the ranking of that page in the search engine. Hence, once you have created a page in Frontpage, you need to open the page in Frontpage's HTML source code viewer (or in any text editor like Notepad) and ensure that the Title tag is present at the top of the Head section. Luckily, if you now make some changes to the page using the default WYSIWYG editor of Frontpage, it will keep the Title tag at the top of the page, instead of again transferring it to the middle or bottom of the Head section.