Staying On Top
      In general, the best way to stay on the top of a search list is by following several rules when developing your HTML pages.

      First, put your keywords in the "TITLE" tag of your document. Yes, that's right, in the "TITLE" tag. A lot of search engines do not even bother with the "META" tags, but rather index according to what you have in your "TITLE". We realize that this might be contrary to what you have read or been told, but it is a fact. Remember that the words and phrases in your "TITLE" tag is what shows up as the title in a user's browser if they bookmark your page. Therefore, the "TITLE" must be clear, short and to the point.

      The second method that will help you to be at the top of the search order is to place the keywords you used in your "TITLE" close to one another in the document portion of your HTML - side-by-side if possible. Also, repeat your keywords throughout the document. The more times keywords appear in a document, the more likely it is that a search engine will put your documentation on the top of the list during a search.

Be Patient
      In many instances, even when you register your pages directly with a search engine, it will take 2 to 4 weeks for your site to actually start coming up during searches. After you have submitted a page, the search engine sends out a "crawler" the reviews and indexes your site and most pages under the page you submitted. When it is finished, your site will then become visible on the search engine.

      Keep in mind that there are millions and millions of pages, so the time it takes for your site to become active is directly proportional to the number of people listing pages with the search engine.

      Now for a word about Yahoo. Yahoo does NOT visit sites! Yahoo only accepts submissions and they are usually screened by humans. Therefore, Yahoo's listings might tend to be biased based on their listing criteria. Also, your additional pages and text will not be included in a Yahoo search.

Beware of Spam
      It use to be that you could repeat the same word over and over again in your document and the search engines would then give that document a high priority. Do not do this! It is not longer accepted by search engines; and, in fact, most search engines today consider this Spamming and will not even post the page. If you list your page with a search engine and it has not become active within several weeks, chances are the engine thought you had placed Spam in your document and did not accept the page at all. That means that your site will never be indexed. Again, using keywords throughout your documentation and close together is good, but putting in lines like "orange juice, orange juice, orange juice, orange, orange juice" will be eliminated as Spam.

Punctuation
      Most search engines ignore punctuation so that Mike's Home Page would appear as Mikes Home Page. This does not mean you should remove punctuation from your document. it is just something to be aware of when you are creating your HTML and keywords.

Tips, Tricks and Traps
      Currently, none of the major search engines index frames. If you use frames on your page, you will not show up in a search. The moral, at least at this time, is NO FRAMES!

      You must have text on your page and it should be high on the page. Search engines consider the top of the page more relevant than the bottom. Focus on two or three keywords and make sure they are repeated in the first several lines of text on each page.

      Beware of tables. Tables will push text farther down on a page. The farther down, the less likely it is to be indexed by a search engine. The use of tables should be limited to the bottom of a page at best.

      Links from your home page are treated as very relevant during a search engine index. The second page and its links are less relevant, the third is less and so on. Therefore, the more links you can put on your home page, the more likely your site will be displayed when a user does a search. At a minimum, always have your most relevant links on your home page. A home page with a single link is relatively worthless if you are trying to make your site visible to search engines.

      Strange things happen with search engines. Sites get dropped and links get messed up. It is a good idea to check back with the search engines every two weeks to make sure your listings are coming up the way you want them to.

      Search engines are getting smarter. Some of them only revisit a site if it changes. Some go one step farther and know when a site only changes once or twice a year. In this case, the search engine marks the site to be visited once or twice a year and that is it; even if the content begins to change 4 times per year. To avoid this either change your home page often, at least once per month, or resubmit your site when things change.

Special Functions Available on Some Search Engines

Alta Vista
      Alta Vista will tell you how many of your pages it has within the database. All you need to do is type in url:yourdomain.com. Do not use the www. So, for instance, if we wanted to see how many instances of Internet Gateway are contained in the Alta Vista database we would enter url:igateway.com. This also works with subdirectories. To see how many references to Victory Ministry there are, you would enter url:igateway.com/mall/religion/victory; or you could check for a specific page by entering url:igateway.com/mall/religion/victory/index.htm.

GO Com
      Go.com provides a special section for checking URLs. Somewhere on their home page is a link to Ultraseek. This link provides a "Special Searches" page that will compile assorted information about your listings in the  database.

WebCrawler
      WebCrawler will tell you when it lasted visited your site and/or when it intends to do so.