By Howard Kaplan 1) PAGE NAME (METANAME) and PAGE URL (TITLETAG) MUST BE THE SAME!
Search engines all work a bit differently. Some search engines are satisfied listing your site by it's page name, others by its URL address. If the URL address is difficult to understand, the search engine crawler will stop reading the page and ignore it and not list the page. For example, let's say your site is called "JOE'S SUNGLASSES" and your first page is "MEN'S POLARIZED SUNGLASSES." If you create the page URL as "http://www.joessunglasses.com/menpolsun" the search engines may well ignore your page and not list it. This is particularly true of GOOGLE, who very much like the metaname and titletage to agree. Ideally, you'd like to your URL to read "http://www.joessunglasses/menspolarizedsunglassses"
2) PAGE NAME MUST INCLUDE SOME KEYWORDS/METATAGS
Search engines may not list your pages if the titles are not unique in some way. If your page is not listed the key words regarding that page will not be active even if other pages of your site are listed. In order to make your page unique keywords or metatags need to appear in the title of the page. The more keywords/metatags you put into the title, the higher in the rankings your page is likely to appear. Although you want to put in as many keywords or metatags as you can, there is also the need to be concise to avoid being ignored by the search engines. Using our previous example, a page name of "SUNGLASSESS" might return in excess of 1 million responses and would probably not get the page listed. A title of "MEN'S POLARIZED SUNGLASSES" would be far more attractive to a search engine but perhaps not as interesting as "MEN'S LUXURY POLARIZED SUNGLASSES," which has 4 key words rather than 3 or just 1 and both would appear sooner than the page titled "SUNGLASSES" alone.
3) KEYWORDS / METATAGS MUST APPEAR IN THE BODY OF THE PAGE
Of course, it is impossible to list all the keywords or metatags in the page title. Although it is possible for any keyword or metatag to be recognized by the search engines, I have found that very often this is not the case. In fact, I have found it absolutely critical to use the keyword or metatag in the body of the page - the more prominentely the better. A keyword or keyphrase used as a section header has a much greater chance of being recognized than a metatag buried in descriptive text.
4) KEYWORDS / METATAGS MUST MOVE FROM GENERIC TO SPECIFIC
Although the keywords necessary to get a page listed must be unique, search keywords must run the gamut from narrow to broad if the page is actually to be found during a search. I have found that splitting the metatags between branded and generic gives the best opportunity of achieving the broadest results. Using our prior example, the list of keywords might include: sunglasses, polarized sunglasses, luxury polarized sunglasses, men's luxury polarized sungasses, Foster Grant polarized sunglasses.
5) WEBPAGE MUST BE LISTED OR KEYWORDS / METATAGS WON'T WORK
Unfortunately, if a particular webpage is not picked up by the search engines none of the keywords/ metatags associated with that page will be effective and no results will be returned for your page even if other pages in the website are listed that do share those same keywords/metatags.
6) YOU MUST SUBMIT EACH PAGE OF YOUR TO EACH OF THE MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES IN ORDER TO BE LISTED - AND IT DOES NOT COST ANYTHING!
It is not enough to submit your home page to the search engines. If you hope to get exposure of all your products and activate all metatags each webpage of a site must be listed. This requires persistance but is not complicated. Google, Yahoo and MSNSearch each have free mechanisms to load pages to the web. Google page add: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl Yahoo page add: http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request MSNSearc&h page add:http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
7) IT CAN BE DIFFICULT TO GET ALL THE PAGES OF A WEBSITE LISTED
Even if you've done everything right, the search engines are likely not likely to list all the pages of the site. In addition, each search engine updates its listing on different schedules. Google is the most difficult search engine in which to get pages listed and to keep pages listed. Don't be discouraged but rather expect you will have to repeat the process.
8) CONTINUE SUBMITTING PAGES ON A WEEKLY BASIS UNTIL ALL PAGES ARE LISTED & KEEP LISTING AS PAGES FALL OFF
With persistance, all of the pages of a website can be listed simply be resubmitting the missing pages in the same manner in which they were listed originally. It should be noted, however, that pages do tend to fall off search engine listings and it will be necessary to relist those sites. There are services available who can perform these services for a fee but I have found it just as effective to use the free submission process.
9) TEST YOUR PAGE RANKINGS AND METATAGS
Testing your page rankings and keywords / metatags will insure that your pages stay fresh and keep high in the listings. Google has an excellent tool that also indicates rankings for Yahoo and MSNSearch. You can find this tool at: www.googlerankings.com.
10) LINKING IS VITALLY IMPORTANT
Much of the secret of getting and keeping webpages listed is linking and despite what you read, it's more important to get websites linked to you than the other way around. If you find there is a limit to the number of links you can find to link to you, avoid link farms as they will be ignored by the search engines and cause pages to be delisted. A more effective strategy is to list your website with any of the many of the free directories that may be found on the web.
I hope this list proves helpful to you. It is the kind of list for which I was looking when I first started.
