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"Bargain of the Millennium"

By: Ernest Seger, Internet Business Marketing

Search Engines (SEs) have been called the Bargain of the Millennium - they attract targeted, pre-qualified prospects to your site in large numbers and at the lowest possible price.

Here are some key concepts and tools to help you in your battle for the top in the SE Wars.

First, Key Words. These are the words that will be used to find your site, so it all begins here.

Bruce Clay has a *phenomenal* Web page with free tools for developing keywords. It will also analyze your own site or a competitor's. It's great and it's free. (http://www.bruceclay.com/web_rank.htm)

Download this great freeware: http://virtualpromote.com/freeware/. It will tell you which keywords and phrases are getting the most action on the SE's and will also keep track of all of *your* keywords on all of the major search engines.

You can also use SEs themselves to help you fine-tune your pages. For example:

Search using one of your keywords on GoTo (http://www.goto.com/). On the yellow side bar of each Results Page you will find other suggested words. Click on the best match and you will be presented with more possible key words in a "drill-down" fashion. Write these down.

Search on Excite (http://www.excite.com/) and you will be provided addition key word suggestions. Write these down.

A quick way to get even more ideas is to go to a competitor's site, and "View Source" in your browser. You'll see their keyword META tags and may come up with an idea or two.

Now that we've gathered some great key words, let's put them to work in HTML:

HTML>
HEAD>
TITLE> Search engines put a LOT of weight on your title. Put
2 or 3 of your most important keywords here/TITLE

META NAME="description" CONTENT="What you enter
here is what searchers will see when your listing pops up. So
make it sell and use your most important key words.">

META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="List keywords and
phrases here. Don't repeat a key word more than two or
three times - it can be considered a form of SPAM">
HEAD>
BODY> SEs will put more weight on key words that
appear towards the top of your page, so begin to use your
keywords right after the -BODY- opens. Particularly in your
page headline.

Two neat tricks for adding key words to the "hidden content" of your page:

Attach an "alt" tag containing key words to each image.
IMG SRC="picture.gif" ALT="sentence-with-your-key-words"

Some SEs take into account key-words in a comment block:
<!-- Comment: paragraph-containing-your-key-words -->

It's finally finished, but you need to make sure your HTML checks out. Use this free tool http://validator.w3.org/.

Everything looks fine, so you begin to submit your site.

After about two weeks, check your ranking on different keywords in 10 of the major SEs with
http://www.rankthis.com.

Make any adjustments for fine-tuning and re-submit.

For further study, check out http://www.searchenginewatch.com/ and http://makingyour.sitesell.com (get the free download for contents).

Whew. You've worked hard and you have a web page that should rank well.

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If you want to *sell* on the web and not just *be* on the
web, get *the* indispensable web sales reference book:
http//www.internetmarketing2000.net.
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> Web site == > http//www.netnetmoney.net
> mailto:eseger@goldenhorizon.com
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