Yahoo !! SITE LISTING

[enterpriseonline]

I have had my site on both google and yahoo for years but so far no had many visitors from them. i was wondering if you could help me by tellings be ways in which to imprive my site ranking in the search engines.

The following is what has been added to Yahoo and Googles search engines.

TITLE :- Star Trek Impulse Factor I Voyager I Next Generation I Enterprise I Nemesis I

DESCRIPTION :- Everything you need to know about Star Trek including Alien Race, Ships, The Delta Quadrant, Picard, Janeway, Kirk, Sisko and Archer. Find Reviews on New star trek Movies such as Nemesis

KEYWORDS :- Star Trek, LCARS, Federation, Schematics, Voyager, Enterprise, Deep Space Nine, DS9, Defiant, The Original Series, The Animated Series, The Next Generation, Archer, Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Borg, TOS, TNG, VOY, NCC-1701-E, Gene Roddenberry, sci-fi, Vulcan, Andorian, Klingon, Delta, Gamma, Batta, Alpha, Quadrant, Impulse, Factor, Dilithium, Trilithium, Generations, Fist Contact, Intrepid, Galaxy, Nubula, Space, Romulan, Kazzon, Caretaker, Commander, Ensign, Bridge, Red, Yellow, Green, Alert, Command, Q, Trek, Nerd, Alien, Race, Join, Newsletter, Reviews, Nemesis, Wallpaper, Armada, Nude, Ship, Picture, Game, dvd, Sound, Convention, Font, Magazine, Music, Movie.


Where have I gone wrong?


Thank You

Kevin S.

[cHIs-wK]

Ever thought it isnt actually on yahoo, or maybe its on the next page, or the page after that or the page after that!

[enterpriseonline]

Well no because it is on yahoo but it only comes up when you type in the direct title. I am asking how I could improve my rank so that it does not show up on the 100th page.

[Ask The Geezer]

First of all, Yahoo is not a search engine. It's a "Directory" with search. Unlike real search engines, Yahoo does not cache your pages, only a title, a description, and the link to your site. If the search does not cover the words the Yahoo editor gave your site, then your not going to come up.

Search engines on the other hand, spider your meta-tags, and all text on the page, including image names, visible text and link names. They pay no attention whatever to comment tags in html. Once the spider has done that, Google caches all of it. From there it goes into a database where it is filtered for junk like tiny text, same color text, too many keywords and other things they want filtered out. Then it's updated to another database periodically, where when a visitor does a search, an internal spider runs through all those cached pages and looks for words in the db that match the search string. As this happens, it's filtered again through the search engine algorhythym which the engineers have set up, and then spits out all the relavent pages in a ranking system the algorhythym code gives it.

If your pages match the criteria set up in the algo, you get ranked, the closer it matches, the higher you get.

Most big search engines use similar structures. The algo is a closely guarded secret from company to company and is generally changed from time to time. That's because of people like us figuring out their system and being able to manipulate it for higher ranking.

Just curious, but what keywords do you want to be found under?

[enterpriseonline]

First of all thank you for your detailed answer. I would like the worlds like STAR TREK, ENTERPRISE, VOYAGER, PICARD,JANEWAY, ARCHER and so on to come up. Mainly the keywords that most star trek frans use.

[Ask The Geezer]

Some things that will help:

Looks like you bought a domain, so put it on a real server. Geocities and the other free servers get the bite on ranking over a non-free server. That comes from the fact that most free server sites don't last long. The engines don't want dead links, so they resist putting free server sites up top.

Get rid of Impulse Factor from your title. Not a keyword. Most of the weight in ranking is given to the title meta-tag. Use it wisely. Get rid of the I's, use commas, or spaces. The spiders can't think, and your not so much interested in how your listing looks as getting top ranking.

No spaces between words in the keyword tag. Spaces are counted as characters, get rid of them, they aren't needed in the keyword tag, just commas.

You've wasted a lot of valuable spider food by naming your buttons things like: 'buttons2_B11_over', and 'buttons_B7.gif'. And your images: title1.gif. Use keywords, better yet, if it's a button linking to a page about Picard, name the button picard.gif.

Also, your site is loaded with dead links. That's not good at all. You'll lose points for that. No search engine wants a bad site up. Since they don't have live people doing the looking and editing of the site, they depend on the spiders and their algo. Finding dead links means the visitor probably will not be satisfied with the site, and from the engine point of view, that's bad. Most of the good search engines keep track of hits AND returns from a link. Someone finds your site up high, clicks off the engine to go to it, finds a bunch of dead links and just uses the back button after a few seconds, the engine knows it. Enough of those kinds of clicks and tommorrow, your ranking is in the dirt.

One thing some SEO people never snap to is that Google, MSN search, Lycos, all the big boys are not in this to give your site a listing. They are in it for themselves. To succeed, they have to have the best sites up, ALL THE TIME. Screw up, and leave it screwed up over succeeding spider visits, and guess where you can find your listing... Just rememer, they are looking for a good solid listing, you are looking for ranking. They have the edge, and don't need you, you need them. So play their game and you'll always come out ahead.

[cHIs-wK]

Doesnt yahoo just use googles search, cos everything on yahoo i exact same as google, and i doubt its the other way round with google, and you know you get google hateers, its pathetic there is nothng to hte about it, the layout is the best ever! loads up in seconds, thats why, anyway

[Ask The Geezer]

Depends on what part of Yahoo you look in. The directory is human edited sites with title and description written by the editors. Awhile ago, Google was using the Yahoo database of static edited listings. For years, Google has used the db from ODP, and still does. Google probably also uses Inktomi and any other db they can get their hands on. Thats why they are the biggest.

The main point is, whichever search engine you go to, they all use their own algorhythym to rank anything in their databases. You have to study how each one does it to compete. The data may be the same, but how they use it is engine specific. For instance, some se's don't use anything from the description tag if there is visible text on the page. One doesn't use the title tag at all, but comes up with their own title for the site listing derived from what they find in the text. It's all a huge puzzle, and I love puzzles.

[cHIs-wK]

[enterpriseonline]

So what would be best:

1. Name each image and button a different keyword for the topic

or

2. Name each image and button the same keyword to gain a better ranking

[Ask The Geezer]

No, name them for the topic. If a button goes to a page with a lot of text on it about Picard, name it picard.gif. Also, name the internal pages of the site for keywords too, like: http://www.mysite.com/picard.htm

You don't want to overdo the keyword thing. About 3 identical keywords for every 125 words of text is good.

[kurtjwayne]

Enterpriseonline,

There's also another thing you can do, though it may be one of those "easier said than done" things depending upon your connections.

I read where the Google and Yahoo system is now looking at what they term "link popularity" on sites...they're looking to see who is linked to you.

My wife and I own an on-line store which we commissioned at the end of 1999, and we built another one for my mother-in-law the summer of that year. Once we commissioned ours, we put hard links between our site and her Mom's...it really started to shoot us up in Google, and started a snowball effect for us. The more links we were able to get linked to our site (i.e. private collector's sites, news stories, vendor links) the better it was for us in Google / Yahoo.

Again, I put "to" in italics because Google doesn't care who you've linked to, but rather who's linking to you. Their logic: if you've got a bunch of people linking to your site it must be important. Therefore, any web site (the more popular the site in the search engines, the better) you can get to link to your site, the better it will positively impact you in Google/Yahoo.

[Ask The Geezer]

There are some things to watch out for on linkpop though. If the site is bad, or porn, or something like a FFA site, it could do you more harm than good. Also, having the Coca-Cola site link to you wouldn't do you a bit of good. Since the engines started using a theme algo, sites that have nothing to do with selling car parts aren't going to help your car parts site.

And you might be surprised how much it helps to have links inside your own site going back and forth as often as possible to your own pages. FrontPage navigation using a shared border is good for this. If you do some in depth research, you'll see a very high proportion of FrontPage made sites on the first page of any search.

[kurtjwayne]

Yes, I wouldn't want Linkpop or any such thing...it's far better to try and get specific sites that are relevant to yours. (In this case, Star Trek sites would be ideal.)

[beyoung2]

Ok... So this sound pretty good so far.
What If I am using the Flash Deployment Kit. Do I put all my meta tags, text and site description on the root level index page? Like, www.mycom.com/index.html which would have the sniffer in it?
I am hearing that any sort of re-direction is considered "bad" by the search engines.

[Ask The Geezer]

They aren't looking for that kind of redirect. What the spiders look for is this:

<*meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="5;URL=http://mysite.com/">

Even then, they will normally leave the page listed for quite a long time, 6 months or more. Server side redirects they can't see at all, or ignore. Flash shared objects they can't see.

[leehill]

Hi,

I work for a design company and we have submitted hundreds of site to the search engines with varying degrees of success..

A few pointers..

1.Metta Tags are dead, yahoo, google and the other big players no longer take them into consideration.

Check this report on "Death of the Metta Tags"

http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ser...2/10-meta.html

2.Site content is the most important aspect, your site should be well designed and contain relevant content to what its subject suggests, ie. it doesnt mislead, or deceive.

3.Link popularity, try to get as many other sites as possible to link to and from your site, this is extremely improtant with most of the big guns.

4.Make sure the opening page of your site contains as many of your keywords as possible, around 3 or 4 of each should be ok, but arranged in a paragraph so as not to appear as spam.

5.If your site is image based and does not contain much text, try adding a paragraph at the bottom of the page (off screen if you dont want to spoil the design) containing keywords and search terms.

6.Avoid using:- refresh, redirect, ghost pages, frames (on the index)

7.Submit your site about every 30 days until listed.

This method works for us, sometimes you need to be a little patient, once your site starts being listed on one search engine it usually appears on the rest before long.

Ive had several catagory listings on Yahoo, but I think that it is more to do with the relevent content of the site than anything that I did with the keywords/metta tags etc, basically if there are 10,000 other sites all offering the same and better content than yourself then you are gonna find it dificult to get anywhere near the top, try to be original and better your competitors.

[kurtjwayne]

Enterpriseonline (and beyoung2), there's one part of coding that I've also come so see is extremely important in Google/Yahoo. Enterpriseonline, you mentioned it in the beginning...here it is:

TITLE :- Star Trek Impulse Factor I Voyager I Next Generation I Enterprise I Nemesis I

The simple "title" coding is SOOOOO important, as the individual said, more important than the METAs. And though most people are going to come in through the index page, google goes through your site and, depending upon the search phrase typed in by the user, may bring you somewhere else into the site. Therefore, if within your site you have a page about, say, the Tholians, carefully think what someone seeking information such as you're displaying would type into the search engines, such as "Tholian information".

Then you could put in the <TITLE> tags something like "Enterpriseonline's Tholian information page".

I won't minimize the other things we've talked about, but this particular (and OH so simple) bit of coding is and has been for the past few year very important in Google / Yahoo. (Also, do not treat your title as a META "keywords" line, though you probably knew that.)

[beyoung2]

Excellent. I use the title to reiterate my keywords.
A third party "web optimization" company proposed these changes... all of which have been addressed and denounced in this forum.
Thanks to all!