MoonLitNite
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Jan 29, 2007, 6:00 AM
Post #8 of 13
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Re: [hlanden] Question about my purchase of domain names....
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Hi Kathy,
Yes, the above posts are right on - search engines are not at all impressed by your meta tags. In fact, they sometimes penalize the website for erroneous and misleading tags. Let's look at what you have on your home page:
<meta name="Keywords" Content="katch, weddings, wedding videography, katch video, KATCH, cinematic weddings, pictures, film transfers, reels, dvd, cinematic, movie, duplication, st. louis, missouri, southeast missouri, 8mm reels, super 8">
First off, as much as we'd like to hope otherwise, search engines are only going to look at the first few phrases. They will not go past a handful and never your 19. And hopefully, you've carefully thought this out and have the most important of the 5 in the first position. I doubt you want to compete with all the big boys using Katch and it's clearly not the most important phrase for potential customers to find you anyway. So give it some serious thought about what are the top phrases (and there are sites that can help you check phrases that are most frequently used by search engine users).
(that will be $50 please.)
Regardless, a search engine is not going to give a flip about the keywords unless those phrases are actually used in your text. After all, how does it feel to be tricked, only to find the promised advertisement (the meta tags here) were never used in the accompanying text? Do you think the end user that typed in the phrase will like a search engine company that generates bogus results? I think not, so they will give websites thumbs down to misleading tags with no associated content. BTW, your best phrases should appear about 4-6 times in the accompanying text. Try using google's "site" command for phrases at your website. Go to the google search box and enter something like the following search.
(we're up to $100 now)
wedding site:www.katchvideo.com
Okay, at least google sees your site. Now try a more descriptive phrase like your tag:
"wedding videography" site:www.katchvideo.com
Bzzzz, no hits - but look at how even though you told google to look at YOUR site, some of the "other guys" were liked enough by google to try to give the searcher an alternative site. Wait a second, don't simply move on. Make a note of these best in class sites and make a point of coming back to see how they got such a desirable search engine rating!
(that tip is certainly worth another $100, so $200 now and the rest of you better cough something up, too!)
But you say, "Look, the visitor can see the words right on the screen!" Oops, wrong - those are JPEG picture files and the search engine cannot "read" them (or even if someone wanted to program it to try doing so, would take up enormous time to harvest one website, let alone millions of sites and billions of webpages). So you must redo your webpages to ensure the words are typed in clear text (use View/Source to check your code if your not a web developer).
(we'll give you this tip for a mere $25, $225 now)
Okay, here's the cincher! Search engines give a very high search rating index when it sees other notable websites link to your site. Here's your magic phrase to type in the search engine:
link:www.katchvideo.com
And your site? Not very good, only a few inbound links from WeDJ :--(
Care to see how many links a site like WEVA has coming in?
link:www.weva.com
Wow, a whopping 214 inbound links - obviously the search engines will love to send traffic to them, provided they have the right text content and meta tags.
But actually, google's "link" command isn't always as good a simply google search for your URL - simply search for:
www.katchvideo.com
(another great tip that's going to cost you $100, up to $325 please)
Finally, while this reference won't cover some of what's above, it's well worth a review if search engine results keep you up at night:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/
And if I was to give y'all more dark secrets I'd have to get out my squirt gun and ...
Good luck Kathy and everyone keep those PayPal wires coming, all <wink>
Michael
Happy Trails to you... until we meet again
(This post was edited by MoonLitNite on Jan 29, 2007, 6:17 AM)
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