From: Tom Samson

Hi Jill,

I've signed up for your newsletter, thanks.

My web site is currently listed on all search engines. Some pages have high rankings, while others do not. I have been doing a lot of research and have learned a lot about how to improve my rankings.

My question is: what am I risking by changing Meta tags on existing pages to try to improve rankings? Can my current rankings and listings be taken off the engines when I change tags?

Thanks for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tom Samson

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Tom,

Changing your Meta tags will have little if any effect on your search engine rankings in any engine. This is especially true with Google, as they don't even look at the keyword Meta tag. (Only Inktomi and Teoma currently utilize the Meta keyword tag.) You may be interested in a recent article about this: http://www.highrankings.com/issue029.htm#seo.

Your Title tag *will* have an effect on your rankings, however. Other major ranking factors are the visible copy on your pages and the words in the hyperlinks pointing to your site. If you are happy with your rankings, you should try not to change those things very much. If you're not happy with your rankings, that's the stuff you'll want to tweak.

Once you've uploaded any edited pages, the search engine robots may come around at any time and index the altered pages. Once they do, your rankings are subject to change. It may take a good four to eight weeks before you notice any differences in your rankings, so don't even think about it for a couple of months, if possible. If you're in a hurry to see your new rankings, you might want to put some pages into the paid-inclusion programs offered by some of the engines.

Good luck!

Jill

++ODP Error Message++

From: Vinod

Good Morning Jill,

I was trying to submit my site to ODP in a category that did not have an editor, but which was relevant to my site.

At the end I got a message saying the following:

"Sorry we could not determine the IP address for this submission. This may be because your browser or ISP has cached the previous page. Your submission has been redirected to the misplaced submissions folder. We apologize for the inconvenience."

I deleted all offline content and cookies and tried submitting again, but got the same msg.

Plz advise. Should I submit my site only to those categories that have editors?

Warm wishes for the New Year.

Vinod

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Vinod,

The word from an ODP Meta Editor at the SES conference in Dallas this past December was that some submissions are receiving that error message, but their submissions are still going through okay.

My suggestion would be to wait four weeks and if your site is not added to the directory by then (which is likely anyway), try submitting it again.

Jill

++Submitting Site Too Often++

From: Dianne

Is it true that it is considered spam if you submit your URL to the search engines too often? If so, how often should a person submit their site?

Thanks in advance.

Dianne

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Dianne,

It will neither hurt nor help to submit your site to any spidering search engine. Their crawling spiders find your site through links pointing to it, so there's no reason to ever have to submit to them. Get listed in the major directories and see if you can convince some other sites to link to yours. That's the best way for the search engines to find and add your site to their databases.

Please read my article on submitting to search engines for more info. It's slightly out of date, but the basics are there.

Good luck!

Jill

++Spiders Not Finding Articles++

From: Marilyn Adamson

Jill,

I'm really stuck and can't find anything you've written on this. Right now our site is set up in such a way that spiders and robots are not finding our articles. They are finding levels one and two below, but not the third level.

It's set up like this:

www.homepage.com
www.homepage.com/menu/category (Directory showing articles available in that section.)
www.homepage.com/feature/article (Actual article.)

I'm thinking it should be set up like this:

www.homepage.com
www.homepage.com/category
www.homepage.com/category/article

Am I right? Do we need to restructure the links, or is there an easy way to code the site so the spider knows to jump to our third level?

Marilyn

P.S. My husband told me to send you chocolate just to thank you for HighRankings.com and your help.

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hey Marilyn,

You should be able to solve your problem very easily by setting up a sitemap which links to all the pages of your site. Use keywords in the hyperlinks within that page, and if possible, put a nice keyword-rich description next to each link.

Add a visible link from the main page to the sitemap page, and the search engine spiders will be able to easily find all your pages.

Hope this helps. Feel free to send that chocolate! (Dark -- no nuts!)

Jill

++JavaScript Rollovers++

From: Susan Garriques

Hi Jill,

First, I would like to thank you for your great ezine. I read it faithfully.

Can you tell me if the search engine spiders are able to follow nav bar navigation if those buttons are image buttons with rollovers as opposed to simple text links? The nav bars I've been using are actually run with JavaScript, so if I look at the HTML, I see the links within the script.

Thanks in advance,

Susan Garriques

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Susan,

Glad you like the newsletter!

The search engines can follow some JavaScript mouseover links, but not all. I'd have to see your code to be sure. Usually, if they have the <a href> tags in them, they can be followed.

There are a couple of additional things you can do to ensure proper search engine spidering of your site. One would be to place your menu links in the <noscript> tag. This tag is used for older browsers that can't read certain scripts. Since search engine spiders are similar to older browsers, they will follow the links within this tag when used for this purpose. The other thing you should do is place some plain-text links at the bottom of the page directing people to your most important pages. This will ensure that the search engines can find, follow and index them.

Plus, as I mentioned in my answer to the previous question, having a visible (non-JavaScripted) link to a sitemap couldn't hurt either.

Good luck!

Jill

++Finding the Best Keywords++

From: Dr Hugh G Frostick

Hi,

Have just subscribed, thanks for the welcome. A useful-looking site. I heard about your website on a developer's forum here in UK.

A question:

I have had a pleasing amount of success with search engine positioning, but the thing that puzzles me is how to work out the key phrases the potential visitor is likely to use. Monitoring the phrases used in the logs for my clients' sites is of use, but I want to know the ones that we are missing!

What's the secret?

Best regards,

Hugh

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Hugh,

That's a great question! Many advocate using log files to determine what keywords people are using to find a site. However, the log files are only as good as the current optimization of your pages. It's a bit of a Catch-22. If your site isn't optimized for certain relevant keywords, they're certainly not gonna show up in your logs!

Thankfully, a few years ago the Mindel brothers came up with a program called WordTracker. Before WordTracker, we basically had to guess what people *might* be searching for that was related to our sites. With WordTracker, we can be much more accurate. Their huge database of keywords is fed information from metacrawler.com and dogpile.com, which give a fairly accurate representation of the words people use to search. (As an aside, one of my claims to fame is that I was WordTracker's very first customer!)

There are similar programs out there, but most of them get their data from search engines that receive a lot of automated queries, i.e., people checking their ranking positions with products such as WebPostion Gold. This makes the other programs' results much less accurate. These days, WordTracker has become the industry standard and should be an essential part of any professional search engine optimization campaign.

You can check it out and purchase a subscription via my affiliate link.

Have fun! I know you're going to love it.

Jill

++Iframes++

From: Michael Nezi

Hi Jill:

Do you know if search engines (Google especially) can read iframes? I have a site that has the bulk of its text on the home page in an iframe.

Thanks,

Michael

~~~Jill's Response~~~

Hi Michael,

My research shows that the search engines are not reading or following the information contained in iframes.

For more info regarding iframes, see the W3C specifications here.

If you can't redesign the site to remove the iframes, you can use the "longdesc" attribute of the <iframe> tag to place a description of the information you want indexed. Browsers that don't support iframes should be able to read and index the information contained within that attribute.

Jill