Search engines: getting your site to come up first?

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Dianne Moscrip wonders <<One of my clients wants their site to come up first
when anyone searches for an item they carry. I thought you could do this
through meta tagging. Is there another more effective method of setting this
up?>>

The most effective way is to do what many online merchants have done: pay
the site that hosts the search engine a fee to list you first (or at least
in the top 10 hits). Sad, but true. The least effective way is to include
meta tags that list your product name 100 times; this is the search engine
equivalent of "spam", and can get you actively barred from some search
sites; at best, it won't likely help you much, since the designers of search
engines have long since figured out such tricks.

As a compromise, there are a variety of things you _can_ do with your Web
pages. First, use appropriate synonyms for your key words, just as you'd do
in an index (e.g., 2-3 synonyms, and ideally the ones that searchers are
most likely to use, not every word you find in Roget's Thesaurus). Second,
make sure the page title, the meta tags, and the "blurb" that describes the
page all contain the most important keywords that will be used in searches;
these words will also appear in the body text of the page, but they must
also be in the tagging for the page itself. Third, don't forget to include
text descriptions of all graphics, since this will help the graphics
themselves get indexed.

But all these are stopgap measures: ideally, you don't want to rely on
search engines at all, because as the Internet grows, you're increasingly
going to be buried among all the other sites, designed by equally
intelligent designers, who use exactly the same tricks. There are many far
more effective ways to attract people to your site, and I can't recommend a
better book than "Poor Richard's guide to Internet marketing and promotion"
(Kent and Calishain, www.topfloor.com). It's an extremely well written and
researched book on how to leverage the internet to get your name out there
to interested people, and it does cover in some depth how to work with
search engines. (The only thing it doesn't really discuss is "branding", but
given that this is a book topic all on its own, it's a forgivable omission.)
It's going to take time and work to master the information in this book, but
you'll get much better results than simply trying to optimize your site for
search engines. Plus, speaking as a mercenary for a moment <g>, you can make
a lot more money selling your clients a total promotion strategy than just
tagging their Web pages.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca

"Technical writing... requires understanding the audience, understanding
what activities the user wants to accomplish, and translating the often
idiosyncratic and unplanned design into something that appears to make
sense."--Donald Norman, The Invisible Computer

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