Hey all, Im gonna post some of my webdesign tricks up here from time to time. Some of ya'll may already know this stuff & can maybe help me understand it all a little clearer

Heres some advice on search engines & how I went about getting my rating higher.

1. Meta tags are the most important. These are small html tags containing keywords, descriptions & information on how to rank your site that the search engines read. Its important to have these 100% correct as most search robots ignore what they dont understand. Keep descriptions short & keep the keywords under 260 characters.

2. Get yourself listed in the open directory. The internet is getting so big & everyone even andrex toilet paper has a website. The search engine software found it hard to tell the difference between sites that contained relevant information & sites that just contained rubish. So the open directory was formed, its designed to be a human edited directory containing relevant sites only. As the open directory is more accurate in searchs than standard search engine software, most search engines now read from the open directory. If you submit your site to a relevant catagory, in my case music/artists/alphabetical/C/, you'll see your site appearing in the search engines if it wasnt already & will find that it is ranked higher if it was already appearing in searches. Find the open directory at http://www.dmoz.org

3. Get as many sites linking to you as possible, the more sites google finds with your link on it, the higher it ranks your page. There are 760 different websites linking to Cloud9 Mission at present. You may need to set up a links page as most sites will expect a link back.

4. Use http://www.bandname.com to send free press releases to the search engines. These are free articles that you can publish containing links & info

5. Google Adwords is an awesome way to promote a site. You specify how much you want to spend per day & your adverts are shown not only on related search results but also on googles many partner sites. Im recieving a lot of hits from it but its the partner sites that help your search engine rank out. Ive notice that google is treating these adverts as a link (see number 3).

6. Professional Hosting & Domain Name. Google ranks sites that have professional hosting & their own domain name (eg. cloud9mission.com) higher than sites hosted with geocities, anglefire, mp3.com, soundclick.com etc.

7. Add relevant text to your pages. Content is king as they say & very single line of hypertext in your webpage is indexed by the search engines. You'll notice that the text on my front page is designed to provide an accurate description of the site including most of the keywords I wish to be associated with. Another cool idea is to open a forum, the text from the threads in your forum will add to the text indexed by google & the keywords google associates with you.

8. Choosing a unique name. For example, a friend of mine is in a band called rush hour & their site has a lot of competition in the searches like the film rush hour, the millions of traffic information site etc whereas cloud9mission has no competition for the name as theres only one site called that.

9. Additional Domain Names. Pointing several addresses to the same site makes google think that there are several different sites about you. I currently own cloud9mission.com, cloud9mission.org & cloud9mission.net

10. Creating sister sites. Even though I have my own .com site, I still keep my mp3.com & soundclick.com pages active as these all add to the sites talking about & linking to my main site

11. Try not to use flash (he says when he owns a flash site lol) because my recent experience of flash sites is that search engines dont like it, or popups & javascript.

Ok well theres just a few of the things Ive tried to increase my ranking.

Enjoy

Lewis

12. Create a robots.txt file. Search engines look for this file as soon as they enter your site as it should contain information on how you want your site searched. For more info on robots.txt click here

13. http://musicmoz.org/ is similar to the open directory, only its for musicians only