Toprank
your search engine ranking improvement place
Toprank is dedicated to giving away free tips and information to improve the place your website ranks in the search engines. So your site doesn't show up on the first page of the search results? Even though you have the right keywords in your metatags? Let toprank be your guide At the moment I work as a multimedia developer. My job includes (amongst other things) the creation of internet pages. At one time I too beleived that metatags were the key to beeing found on the internet. But I turned out to be foulishly wrong. From that moment on I have been gathering information on the subject and I learned a lot of usefull things. Now the time has come to see if the information I gathered really works. I called this project toprank. Below are the tips that should help your page to be found on the first result screen of any search engine you submit it to. (oh yeah, for your information, the tips are in no particular order).
TOPRANK - Tip 1
Make sure you have something to give. Sometimes you search for something and the search comes up with all sorts of pages, mostly irrelevant to what you are looking for. People who search for something are, most times, in need of some information. There you are on the number one position for that particular keyword. People visit your site, but it doesn't really hold any information on the subject. Fine, you've got the traffic you wanted, but is that really all there is to it? I myself would be very pissed off if this happened. This would lead to people recognising your site the second time and not going there again. Even if you do add relevant information later, your image has been damaged by luring people to your site under false circumstances. I advise therefore that you make sure your site is found on information it really holds, and that is relevant to the people that search for the words you want your site to be found on.
TOPRANK - Tip 2
Choose a name for your site or product. Choose a name for your site if you can. Just like I did Maybe you've got a product that you want to promote? That could be used as well. You'll be surprised how many people remember product names better. It is allso a unique differentiator from other sites, because they have to stick with the regular keywords. If you can select a name that holds words that are relevant to your pages content. Take my name for example: Toprank. I just made it up. It consists of two words: top and rank, and thats exactly what you were looking for, weren't you? If you've heard it once or read it somewhere you'll be able to remember it better. If you can afford it (I obviously can't) allso reserve a domain for that name and buy copyrights for the name. A lot of people type in domain names as a way to search. So allso keep the names simple.
TOPRANK - Tip 3
Use basic HTML where you can Search engines use a special little program to index your site. This program 'parses' your pages like a very old internet browser. They work therefore a lot better on straight HTML than on all the new things. Using standard HTML is thus a way to inshure that your page gets indexed properly.
TOPRANK - Tip 4
Don't use frames if you don't have to There are several things, that one or more of the big search engines can't cope with. One of them is frames. As far as I know only Infoseek and Lycos support frames. If you have a frameset as a opening page and don't make good use of the 'NOFRAMES' tag, the indexing of your cool new web site stops just there, at 'index.htm', without having ever seen any of the subsequent pages. A way around this problem is to have two versions of your pages, one with frames and one without. If you don't want to make and maintain to different version ot your pages, read the nex tip.
TOPRANK - Tip 5
Use the 'NOFRAMES' tag Remember that search engines index your page like it was seen with a very old browser. When they encounter frames they show you wat's in between the noframes tag. I used to put something like this in my noframes section: This site requires a frame-capable browser. Get one at Netscape. Togheter with a link to the netscape site. That turned out to be very wrong. Put a descriptitve text in the noframes section of your document using the same keywords as the real page. Besides that take up a link into the menu frame of your site. You might think it's no use because if people click it they'll get a mess on screen. But the spider, as the program is called that indexes your page, can follow this link and then index subsequent pages. This wouldn't have been possible without this link.
TOPRANK - Tip 6
Write clean pages Spiders like a standard page. They'll find the title better if it is included within the 'HEAD' tags. Allso some of the spiders look at the first couple of lines of your document after the 'BODY' tag. If these lines contain a lot of irrellevant information you lose a chance to increase your ranking. Words that are accented are allso seen as more relevant. Words at size 'H1' are more important than plain text. This allso goes for italic text.
TOPRANK - Tip 7
Don't just focus on keywords in your meta-tags Only some (3) search engines use meta-tags: Hotbot, Infoseek and Webcrawler. I used to completely rely on them until I found this out. Meta tags should not be forgotten, thats true. But they are merely a small part of the things you can do to be found.
TOPRANK - Tip 8
Use the 'ALT' tags on your images well Of the eight main search engines 4 index the ALT tags on your images. These tags can thus be used to boost the frequency of your important keywords. I used to type 'ALT' = 'image' but no I have the images hold an 'ALT' tag of 20 words of more. Even if the tags don't fit in the box they still get read by the spider. A trick I heard about was to put an invisible image on your home page (a one by one pixel transparent gif) with an 'ALT' tag. This is a way to get additional words indexed. Lycos especially likes 'ALT' tags and indexes them well.
TOPRANK - Tip 9
Focus your activities on the main search engines. There are programs that offer submission to 100 search engines, but who on earth uses them? Confine your activities to the main search engines to get the most out of your efforts. - Hotbot - - Exite - - Yahoo - - Altavista - - Webcrawler - - Infoseek - - Lycos - - Search.com - HR>TOPRANK - Tip 10
Use your tiles well The only thing that gets indexed by *ALL* the search engines is the title. Check out the title of this document. It could have read 'TOPRANK home' ore something like that. But now it holds a nice set of keywords for the search engines to index.
TOPRANK - Tip 11
What keywords should I use? This is a very difficult one. Use relevant words of course. General words like 'industry' don't say anything about you in particular and thus add no value. If you're in a tight field with a lot of competitors, use differentiators. If you're the sole person offering someting, keep the words general. Allso some words don't get indexed by search engines because the appear too often. These kind of words include 'and' and 'web'.
TOPRANK - Tip 12
Increase word frequency How often a word appears on your page, can be important to the relevancy factor your site gets for a word. Why do you think I used the word TOPRANK in front of every tip? If you take two simmilar pages, but use a specific word more often on one of them, it will rank higher. Because some search engines count the number of times a word appears. All search enigines use a differen way to index pages as you might have noted. word relevancy is often done by checking the number of words and divide that by the number of times a word apppears on a page. Thus, if you have a small number of words on your page a word might be more relevant than the word a same amount of times on a page with a bigger total amount of words. Beware though, Lycos only indexes pages with more than 75 real words. No tags. If you stay under that amount Lycos' spider won't index that page.
TOPRANK - Tip 13
Check word location Some spiders check where a word is placed in a document. This results in words at the top of your document getting a higher relevancy value than the same word would get near the bottom of the page. It is a good custom to write a little three text that describes your site. Put as many keywords in this text as you can bet keep it readable. This story can be used in many ways. In the 'NOFRAMES' tag. Just after the 'BODY' tag because the first 200-300 characters after it get indexed more often than the rest of the text. It can be used in the ALT tags of images. And allso in the content meta tag.
TOPRANK - Tip 14
Use the titles of documents in your frameset You've (hopefully) have made a link in your 'NOFRAMES' section that leeds into your page. When the subsequent pages get indexed, the title of these pages is indexed as well. Grab the oppertunity. Use the same long title for all these pages. Tou'll never see them but they get indexed just the same.
TOPRANK - Tip 15
Try to avoid Image maps As well as very old browsers, spiders can't read image maps. and will not index your page right because of them.
TOPRANK - Tip 16
Don't use javascript for navigation If Javascript is the core of your navigation, you have a problem. Spiders don't do javascript and will thus stop indexing your page. Allso javascript takes up a lot of document space. Remember that only the first 200-300 characters got indexed by the spiders? If thats where you've got your javascript, all chances of a good index are lost. If you really want to ise javascript, try to put it on the end of your document.
TOPRANK - Tip 17
Try to avoid Images in general Allthough images look very nice to your user, the words that are shown in that graphic will never be indexed by a spider. Be shure to use 'ALT' tags and additional text based 'HREF's to make shure these words get indexed allso. Otherwise you'll miss out on words that might make your site more relevant.
TOPRANK - Tip 18
Avoid capitals if you can. How do people search? It appears that about 80% types everything in lower-case. Keep all the words in your title and meta tags lower-case. Some of the search engines are case-sensitive. By using undercase type as do most people who go searching, you'll have the biggest chance of beeing found.
TOPRANK - Tip 19
Don't spam Spamming is anything that fools spiders. Search engines would like to give realistic search results. Ant herefor don't like 'spamming' Say you'll just put the same words a lot of times near the bottom of your page, just to increase frequency. Spiders can tell if you use repetitve words and will penalise you for doing so. Allso if you use words that are the same color as your background color, or words in a very small type face this will be noted as spamming. All search engines penalise you for spamming. This could mean dropping your position a couple of places. Or even exclusion from the whole database. Be carefull. Don't spam!
TOPRANK - Tip 20
Check out your competitors Type in the words you think are important. And find out who your competitiors on the web are. People that are on the number one position for a specific word have certainly done their homework right. Look at these pages to see how they are organised. What other keyowrds they use, What information they offer and so on. Remember to differentiate your from them. Just copying won't do.
That's it. I know that if you want to make a nice design you can't allways obey all these rules. That's why they are called tips. Keep them in mind, and they WILL make a difference. Good luck in making your way to that number one position.
Written by J-roen in 1998 This site is best viewed with your eyes open. Keep the web free!
