Web Promotion

Introduction
If you have your own Web page or site, it's important that people can find your site or homepage. There are several ways to accomplish this. Probably the most important way is using META tags. These special HTML tags provide search engines with keywords and a description of your site, so "they" know what the subject of your site is. As a result, it's more likely that your site is found if an Internet user searches with those keywords in the search engine that has indexed your META tags.

It's important to remember the following: Some search engines may reject your site if, for example, you use the same keyword over and over again in your keywords list. Another reason for a search engine to refuse your site could be that you use keywords which have nothing to do with your site.

We can highly recommend to only use a keyword once, and to only use keywords that really have something to do with your site. To give you an indication what type of keywords are searched for most, you can visit one of the following search engine pages that show the most popular keyword searches for that specific search engine.

TITLE Tag
The first important thing to do with an HTML page is to give it a title. The page title may be used by a search engine as a title for your page in search results as well. We recommend you use a short, but very "describing" title for your page. For example, if you have a site about car maintenance and repairs, a possible good title would be: "Car Repairs and Maintenance" rather than "This site is about cars. Information about how to repair them, and all about maintenance".

A maximum size of 55 characters for your page title is recommended. Since your page's title maybe used in search engine's results, it's important that it's not too long, is only 1 sentence, and that by reading the title, the person using the search engine almost exactly knows what your site is about, just by looking at your page's title. Even when him or her has not visited it yet. But, it's probably all a matter of style.
Here's an example of a title in a HTML page. Just like META tags, the title tag should be between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags:
   <TITLE>Car Repair and Maintenance</TITLE>
META Tags
META tags are special HTML tags which allow you, as explained before, to enter keywords and a description of your site. The META tags are to be placed between the <HEAD> and </HEAD> tags also. Below is an example of the two most important META tags. We'll use the Car Repair and Maintenance example again:
   <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Info on car repairs and maintenance.">
   <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="car, repair, maintenance, cars">

Some, if not all, search engines have limits on the number of characters entered in the META tags. Since these limits may differ, we can recommended that you keep the maximum length of both the description and the keywords META tags, in the CONTENTS part, to a maximum of 200 characters each.

A possible way to create a good list of keywords for your page is to imagine yourself searching for your own page. Try to think of all possible keywords that are relevant to your page, and with which you believe your site or page should be found. Write them down, and then choose the best, or all of them if they do not exceed 200 characters.

The description META tag is very important, it should contain what a user can expect to find on your site or page. It's just like the title, only more detailed.

Other tricks
There are a few other tricks which may possibly improve the ranking of your site in search engines. But, we do have to warn you again, they may also cause your site to be rejected if you use them as a way to spam. Just try to not use more keywords/words in a description than necessary.

If you have images on your site, you can add a description to them to describe what they are about. Below is an example:

   <IMG SRC="/image/example_car.gif" ALT="Ford Mustang '65">
In this example, it's possible that some search engines will index "Ford Mustang '65".

Another trick which might improve your site's ranking is to use the most important keyword as the first word in your TITLE tag or META DESCRIPTIION and KEYWORD tags. If we take the example site about cars again, in stead of using "Info about Repairs and Maintenance of a Car" (where "Car" is probably the most important keyword), use "Car Repairs and Maintenance" as we already used in the example. This might improve your site's ranking in search engines.

Complete Example
Now, for a complete example of a HTML page with title and META tags:
   <HTML>
   <HEAD>
   <TITLE>Car Repair and Maintenance</TITLE>
   <META NAME="description" CONTENT="Info on car repairs and maintenance.">
   <META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="car, repair, maintenance, cars">
   </HEAD>

   <BODY bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
   ...
   </BODY>
   </HTML>

Submit your site!
When you have finished preparing your site or page for submission to search engines, here are a few we can highly recommend you:

But these are just a few of the search engines on the Internet. For a much larger list of search engines, please visit our search engines list. Other great search engines lists can be found on AllSearchEngines.Com and Deee's Homepage.

Before submitting your site to a search engine, we recommend you read the policies of those search engines. They might contain information which are useful to know before you submit your site. Some search engines have so called "spiders" which automatically "spider" your entire site and index all pages. Not all search engines use these spiders, for example, Infoseek doesn't. If you want to add multiple pages to the Infoseek index, you will have to submit each URL separately.

Tools for Web promotion
On the following pages you can find tools which can help you create and/or generate HTML tags, and which can help you submit your site to search engines:

Other ways to submit your site
The following URLs are links to sites which allow you to submit your site to multiple search engines:

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