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Search Engine Ranking There are only about 8-10 major search engines and about 85% of the hits you get from search engines and directories will come from these. If your site isn't listed in the top 20-30 listings when a search is placed on one of your keywords, it's not likely that anyone will ever find your site in the search engines. Most people (myself included!) won't browse past the first 2 or 3 screens of links returned by the search engine. There are ways you can increase your sites ability to place in a higher ranking in each search engine. Beware, this can be a very daunting task as the search engines change their rules and redesign their databases regularly. Because they are aware that people are trying to achieve higher rankings, many of the old tricks that used to gain a higher ranking no longer work. In fact, if you use some of these tricks today, you could totally disable your site from being listed. So you must be very careful what you do to your pages when attempting to get a higher ranking in the search engines. NOTE: The following information is only the "tip of the iceburg" when it comes to understanding how to rank high in the search engines. This area has become a whole new industry and there are people out there who spend their entire day doing nothing but studying, testing and working with search engines. If you plan on using this tactic, we recommend you 1) hire someone that does this day and night and knows exactly what's happening with the search engines this month, or 2) purchase The Unfair Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars. This book is published and updated monthly by Planet Ocean Communications and is one of the best sources of information on how to rank high in the search engines. A must read for the do-it-yourselfers out there. Here are some of the things that won't work and will, in fact, cause your site to be banned in many search engines. Keyword "spamming" and Keyword "stuffing" OR "spamdexing" - This trick can be used anywhere on your page but you'll usually find them in META and TITLE tags. An example would look something like this: <meta name="keyword" content="keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword"> The search engines use a "keyword ratio" math calculation to rate your pages. This type of coding will cause your keyword ratio to be so high that your page may be dumped altogether. Invisible text - This is often used in conjunction with Keyword Spamdexing (above). This trick puts text anywhere on the page and uses an attribute tag to color the text the same as the background so the human eye cannot see it. If you've ever run across a page that appears to have a large "blank" area at the top or bottom of the page, you'll probably find many hidden keywords if you look at the source code. Most of the search engines now check the background color against the font attribute tags to see if this tactic is being used. If so, your page gets dumped by that engine. Redirect Pages Using Meta Tags - The meta tag can also be used to redirect someone to another page. Some people use this function to rank higher in the search engines by creating an entry page with an excellent keyword ranking that redirects the surfer to the real front page of the site. Some search engines will penalize or ban your page if you use this tactic. Using Keywords That Are Popular But Don't Apply To Your Site - This is a really stupid tactic to use to get hits. "Sex" is a popular keyword and many people stuff their page full of these types of keywords. It may boost their hits, but it will only aggravate the surfer when they get to the page and find that it doesn't contain what they searched for. Some search engines periodically manually review sites and will penalize you for this but basically is it just really dumb and won't do anything to increase your bottom line. There are many others tricks you can use to rank high in the search engines but they may change from month to month as the search engines continue to outwit us by changing the rules. You may wonder why they battle against us in this regard. Their take is that they try to offer the community the best overall pages available on a subject and that is done by ranking pages on their true keyword density. Therefore, they feel that these tricks do not deliver the best listing of sites and continually change their rules and keyword calculations in an effort to make it fair for everyone. It's important to stay on top of the information being gathered in this regard if you plan to use this tactic in your marketing efforts. The Unfair Advantage Book on Winning The Search Engine Wars contains all the information you will need to stay on top of the search engines, if you decide to pursue this area on your own. The book is updated monthly and broken down by each search engine so you will know exactly how to set up pages to submit to Infoseek, Alta Vista, Excite, etc. They will even recommend software programs you can use to help you code your pages to rank higher. As a subscriber to this book, I highly recommend it. The people at Planet Ocean are top notch and it is well worth the price. Copyright © 2001 ThunderLink All Rights Reserved.