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Category Name
Site Promotion
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Last Article Update
Tue, 28th Mar 2006
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   Site Promotion

How do I get my site in search engines? 

The most important thing to remember about getting into a search engine is that it takes time. Sometimes months, to get listed in a good spot.

Each and every search engine has its own policy for indexing your site. (Indexing your site simply means that they review your content, and tie it to relevant search results). Your best bet would be to contact the companies you want to get listed with, and ask what their policies are for getting indexed. Generally, this information can be found on their "help" sections.

While we'd love to help you get ranked #1 for your keywords, unfortunately this is something we cannot assist you with.

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Can a search engine disqualify my site? 

Yes, absolutely.

The majority of search engines have built it "cheat detectors", for lack of a better term.

If you submit your site too many times, or create false "links in", duplicate your content on another site, or any one of various other things could get your site disqualified from being listed in the top spots.

The best thing to do, is ask the search engine company in question what their policies are.
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What are some tips to get more visitors? 

Depending on who you ask, you'll get a ton of different answers to this question.

Here's my two cents:
1) Find sites that have similar themes to them, and ask to swap links. Generally site owners do this to increase the traffic to their own site.
2) Publicize your site online, and in person. My personal favorite promotion is bumper stickers. You can order them fairly cheap, and people always notice them. (I have one for one of my sites on my car, and people comment on it all the time.)
3) Keep your content fresh and interesting. If people see that your site never changes, they'll be less likely to return, or tell your friends about it.
4) If you have the budget for it, give something away on the site periodically. I know from first hand experience, months where we give something away, our traffic skyrockets.

In the end, it's all about how good your site is, as to whether or not people are going to want to visit. Keep your site fresh, entertaining, and well designed.
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How do I use META tags to get better listings? 

1.) In the HEAD section of your HTML file, type <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="
2.) Type a few words that concisely describe the topic of your page. Separate each word with a comma AND a space.
3.) Type "> to complete the META tag.
Your finished tag should look like this:
<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="baseball, sports, games"> (replacing baseball, sports, games with words relevant to your website)

Some general hints: Use a combination of general and unique words to describe the content of your page. Even misspelling certain words may help visitors find your page. Your goal here is to match the things a possible visitor might type into the search engine.

Note: the majority of search engines limit your "keywords" to 200 characters. Anything more than 200 (as I often see) can get you disqualified, and actually ruin your ranking.
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Should I pay a search engine optimization company to get me listed? 

If you ask that company, yes, I'm sure they'll give you 300,000 reasons why you should fork over a couple hundred dollars.

If you ask me, no, absolutely not. Why? Well, I'm glad you asked, here's my logic:

If five different companies sell tires, and want to be listed as number 1, when someone searchs for tires, there's a problem.

Say all five of those companies pay a "search engine optimization" company to get them "guaranteed listings as number 1", as these companies often claim. Who wins? If they're all guaranteed to be number 1, how is that possible if there's 5 of them?

Do I think it will help your ranking, by paying them? No. I've built numerous sites that rank extremely well on certain keywords, without paying a single person, or even submitting the sites to search engines. It's all in the content, and keywords on your site.
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Does the content of my site help search engines? 

In today's day and age, there's no clear cut right or wrong answer to this.

Some people say major search engines only look at META tags, while others say that META tags don't matter these days.

Personally, I think it's combination of the two. Having good META tags, with good keywords, in addition to having good content on your site, helps.

Also, having a clean, clear page title, and URL helps a lot too. Naming your pages as "mypageabouthtml.html" would be better to get listed than "page3.html", as search engines to look at this as an important feature.

The best advice I have, is to keep trying. Every site, and every search engine is different. While your site may do well on MSN search, it may do poorly in Google. Keep trying different things, and keep your content consistently themed.
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Google Verification Meta Tags within Sitebuilder sites 

While we do not support Google's Webmaster tools directly since it is a third party tool, I can offer you this suggestion since you are using Sitebuilder to build your site.

The URL Verification will not work due to how Tripod handles 404 pages.  This is unfortunate, but we cannot control how Google's Webmaster tools verify sites.

We suggest using the Meta Tag verification system and this will need to be done outside of the Sitebuilder application.

Once you have completed any changes to your site, make sure to publish the new version of the site.  Once that is complete, use the File Manager tool within your Tripod Membership.  This should be available to you from the top menu bar on the Tripod Membership Homepage.

The file that you will want to edit is your homepage, index.htm or index.html.  From within File Manager, click on the checkbox next to the file name and then click the button labeled Edit to edit this file.  The following message will display:

    This page was created in Tripod Site Builder . You can edit it in one of two ways.
             Edit using Tripod Site Builder.
             Edit using the FreeForm editor.
    If you choose to edit your page in FreeForm, your site will be permanently converted to straight HTML and you will be unable to edit it with Tripod Site Builder.

Make sure to select the Option for Edit using the FreeForm editor and then click the Continue button.  The underlying HTML code for your homepage will appear on the next page and will give you a chance to edit your homepage.  You can manually add the Google Verification Meta Tag within this editor, you should follow the directions that Google provides you with in order to properly place the code.  Once you are done adding the code, click the Save button.

You should now see that Google will properly verify your site.  Unfortunately, the next time you publish your site, these changes will be overwritten.  That is the nature of how Sitebuilder works.  However, once you have published your new changes, you can follow these directions to return to the edit page and add your Google Verification Meta Tag back to the homepage so that your site remains properly verified within the Webmaster tools.

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