get top ranking with search engines? 4

[precie]

What is the best way to get top ranking on search engines. I hear that meta tags are not as important as they used to be and heard that the content on the home page or index page is the most important. Also, some search engines require a fee like askjeeves whereas others are free like google. Does that mean that one will get better results with the paid sites. If so, how do sites get top ranking on google if it's free. Also, there are so many search engines out there. How can one get picked up on them all or is that unreasonable to think of.
Thanks for any info
John Chartrand

 

[MrBelfry]

As far as I can tell it is almost impossible to guarentee top ranking with any seach engine.

The advice used to be have relevant metatags and code to the standards. Metatags are becoming increasingly irrelevant to search engine listings and Google may decide that you well coded site is an attempt to manipulate their listings!

A site like

http://www.seochat.com

has lots of information about search engines but it seems to be a full-time job and I would look at alternative ways of promoting your site as well as relying on search engine listing

MrBelfry

http://www.mrbelfry.co.uk

 

[ChrisHunt]

There's another forum for discussing this sort of thing: forum828

How do you get top ranking at search engines? Have a well-organised site with lots of relevant content. Anybody who says you can get it by using special tags or submission methods is selling snake oil.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[jrbarnett]

precie

Get hold of the Lynx text mode web browser from:

http://lynx.isc.org/release/

and see how easy it is to navigate your site using this. This view is what Google, Altavista and the other search engines will see. Accessibility here is also a good indication of how accessible the site is to screen readers for the visually impaired, because it doesn't use CSS, graphics, javascript etc.

Also, the way google seems to work is that it partly relies on links from other sites, so if you post the URL in your TT signature, the chances are within a few days Google and a few others will have spidered it.

John

 

[Wullie]

This view is what Google, Altavista and the other search engines will see.

I have heard a lot of people saying this, and it's not actually true.

A spider does not use a browser, it sees the code rather than the rendered version of a page so what you see in Lynx is different from what the spider will see.

If you view the source of the page then that is what the spider will see. Using regex, it extracts certain parts of the page and discards other parts.

Hope this helps

Wullie

http://www.freshlookhosting.com

http://www.tutorial-world.com

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[MichiganRon]

Looking for a way to become top ranked on search engines is like looking for the Holy Grail or the Fountain of Youth. You'll never find any of them.

The moment you think you're close, the search engines go and change the rules on you.

ChrisHunt is right. Having a well-organised site with lots of relevant content will help. jrbarnett is also right about the link idea. At this time, having your site linked to by other sites will help to raise your "standings" in Google.

Don't use JavaScript for navigation. Spiders won't follow JavaScript. Always use basic HTML for navigation and that too will help.

Anyway, good luck in your "full time" quest. And, if you find that mountain of gold, do post directions here. We'd all love to see it! ;-)

-Ron

We all play from the same deck of cards, it's how we play the hand we are dealt which makes us who we are. -Me

murof siht edisni kcuts m'I - PLEH

 

[Wullie]

Want guaranteed first rankings?

Buy Google.

It's the only way you could do it.

Wullie

http://www.freshlookhosting.com

http://www.tutorial-world.com

http://www.freshlookdesign.co.uk

The pessimist complains about the wind. The optimist expects it to change. The leader adjusts the sails. - John Maxwell

 

[NNIsarahd]

Some search engines use Overture for its background. For engines like this, you have to bid on keywords to get towards the top. The highest bidders make it towards the top.

Their site is

http://www.overture.com

I know our webmaster spends at least a couple hours on that site, making sure that we get the keywords we need.

 

[stormbind]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...iserable+failure+president&btnG=Google+Search

How do you explain that?

Try deleting "president" from the search string. Not as funny these days because it used to get poll position!

----------
I'm willing to trade custom scripts for... [see profile]

 

[ChrisHirst]

It's called "google bombing" and it really shows up one weakness in google, where too much reliance was given to the anchor text of links to the page.

This was just the efforts of a few "blog" sites and the like, using "miserable failure" in anchor text linking to the George Bush bio page.

It only takes a few links to do this, the example was around 30 pages.

another example of "google bombing" is;

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=weapons+of+mass+destruction

Google do appear to be addressing this with the November and January algo changes, but we'll know more when this latest one (happening now) settles out.



Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[AncientTiger]

Used to be all I heard was meta tag this and meta tag that... now all I'm hearing is "don't waste your time". I'd tend to agree. I've activated dozens of sites, and they show up just fine without USING ANY META TAGS WHATSOEVER. You can KILL yourself worrying over them and still it wouldn't matter.

Now, repeat the 21st century mantra, "Good content, relevant content, good content, relevent content..."


------------------------------------
Nearly 20 years of programming, and still learning every day!

 

[BabyJeffy]

META tags are not *just* for search engines to use, of course. They can give a huge amount of information to other software applications. I personally put author, keyword and description META tags on all my sites - not that I care if they get a high or low ranking.

Regarding all this discussion on Google SEO - I just did a search through all their corporate pages on META tags. Nowhere do they make mention of ignorning META tags, nowhere do they recommend not using them, and nowhere do they make mention that the likes of keywords, author and description tags are ignored. Until someone can actually prove that this is the case, I would urge people to make up their own minds.

There are success stories about people who used no tags and still managed high ranking. Congratulations... I would expect these people managed this through quality content.

I respect that some of the posters on this forum have dealt with SEO a *lot* more than I have. Some of you may even be working in the Search Engine industry... but I've been around too long to just take what people say for granted (without any supporting evidence).

Those are my thoughts.

Jeff

PS: I have no involvement, experience or interest in the success of any SEO company (just in case you thought I was trying to defend a business model or something).

 

[ChrisHirst]

Jeff is quite right.
Just because meta keywords are not used by the bigger engines for context or ranking purposes does not mean they are not read or indexed. Other small engines do use meta tags for search phrases.

Just remember, Google didn't start off as the biggest search engine.




Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?

 

[ChrisHunt]

Jeff,

Apart from browsers (which read them but don't do anything with them), and search engines (which generally ignore them), what &quot;other software applications&quot; might use the &quot;huge amount of information&quot; you lock up in <meta> tags? If YOU have a use for them - and you may well do so - then fill them in, otherwise don't waste your time.

Google don't say what they do with meta keywords, but then they say very little about how they index and rank sites anyway. That's partly because their algorithm is constantly changing, and mainly because they want to keep it secret from competitors and unscrupulous SEOs.

A good article about the (non) use of meta tags by search engines can be found at

http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=102

, a second article on the same site (

http://www.traffick.com/article.asp?aID=105

)comments

&quot;Google doesn't completely ignore meta tags [...]. They may give a very low weight to keyword tags (we'll never know how much). More importantly, the index will grab a description meta tag as a &quot;fall-through&quot; if a site's home page doesn't contain much if any usable text, nor alt tags on images.&quot;

There are a lot of webmaster advice pages dotted around the internet that tell you it is vitally important to devote lots of time to your <meta> tags in order to get well listed. This was true once, but it isn't any more. Unless you have your own uses for them, you can spend your time better on writing new content.

What uses might you have? The best one I can think of is for your own site's internal search engine. You can trust your own meta tags not to include useless spam, so you may want to make use of them when ranking pages. General search engines don't have that luxury.

-- Chris Hunt

http://www.mcgonagall-online.org.uk

http://www.napitalia.org.uk

http://www.leicesteryha.org.uk

 

[BabyJeffy]

Chris,

I understand your words... and your note of caution regarding assuming that SOEs can work wonders with site placement using tags alone.

I agree with you regarding SEO... but I am also acutely aware of the *lack* of factual (and conflicting) information (for the very reasons you have hilighted) surrounding the use of meta tags to maintain high ranking with search engines. Indeed, there is no reason why you should be spending hours maintaining meta tags in the hope of gaining some &quot;magical placement&quot; on search engines... but even your post (quoting the articles you listed) hints that there is *some* relevance given to such meta tags (low weighting values).

I said it at the start of my last post: META tags are not *just* for search engines to use, of course. They can give a huge amount of information to other software applications. Remember - I was not posting in defence of SEO via meta tag use (in fact I was posting in support of meta tags -- independant of how they are used).

Some search engines use the description meta tag (instead of lifting information from the page indexed) when placing a description/summary of the page in their index (not that you will be able to do much other than provide a useful human-readable description with this tag). That is why I take the effort to always supply this tag.

As a web developer (who has to get contracts to pay the rent) I like to be able to &quot;prove&quot; I was involved with a web site development. Rather than plastering cheesy &quot;Site developed by XYZ&quot; on a client site, I seek permission (which has never been turned down) to put my name in the author meta tag. My last contract required some site references - I was able to provide several websites (where if they had taken the time they would have seen my name in the author meta tag). And that is why I take the effort to supply this tag.

You asked me what uses I might have (and I will qualify my use of &quot;huge&quot; -- I was referring to the quantity of pages that I am required to touch -- not the quantity of software applications that would use such tags), and you are spot on with your observation... I primarily use these tags for an intranet search summary. The ability to index PDFs and Word Documents alongside my HTML (php in fact) is a requirement. But this is not the only use (although it is the primary use that I have for them).

An intranet I am working on uses the tag data to provide useful and meaningful information to &quot;other applications&quot; - including an XML pump (used in a B2B setup by a &quot;sister&quot; company), a &quot;robot/spider&quot; that is used to parse the author tags (and report on documents that are not authored by current employees -- automatically flagging them for editing and update) and a custom-written application for allowing remote sites (with slow and error-prone network access) to view document summaries offline and queue them for delivery overnight.

I'm not personally interested in gaining a rank with any of these sites (I mean... who really cares outside the organisation itself exactly who authored a document). And it was never my intention to do so -- I'm not in marketing after all!

I know it's frustrating answering the same kind of question &quot;what meta tags should I use to guarantee 1st rank on XYZ search engine?&quot; -- more so when the likes of myself muddy the water with opinion and doubt. But I was not attempting to imply that this was the &quot;holy grail&quot; in ranking solutions... I was trying to place comments like this one: ...now all I'm hearing is &quot;don't waste your time&quot;... in context.

Looking back this message has got waaaay too long. Apologies to those of you with a short attention span (hehe... but then you will never see this apology, will you? *grin*).

You know, before I came to TekTips I didn't even know that SEO existed as a discussion topic. I guess it touches a sector of our industry... but not one that I have been involved with significantly to date.

All the best!
Jeff