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Each major search engine collects its information slightly differently,
and each applies different policies on how your site is ranked
compared to other sites.
Some search engines use software programs known as crawlers, robots
or spiders. These programs follow hyperlinks from one webpage to
the next around the Web. When a crawler discovers a new site or
page, it automatically adds it to the search engine index.
Other search engines require you to submit information about your
website to them directly before they will list it. See the How
to Submit to Search Engines tutorial for more information and direct
links to two search engine submission pages.
Website Ranking
Each search engine uses a complicated formula or algorithm that
determines where you will appear on their list when someone performs
a search. Search engines are constantly updating and changing these
formulas. A search engine's help page may give you general information
on how they index websites, but the exact formulas are usually
well-guarded secrets. Many search engines have a restriction on
how often you can submit your website or update the information
about your website. This prevents people making incremental changes
to their submission on a daily basis to see if it improves their
ranking.
We suggest that you use keywords that are appropriate to your
subject, and make sure they appear in the top paragraphs of actual
text on your webpage. Search engine algorithms often score the
words that appear towards the top of your document higher than
the words that appear towards the bottom.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) tags you can build
into the code of your website. Some search engines use the information
you insert in your meta tags to index your website. Here are two
meta tags, included within the HTML document's tags:
<HEAD>
<TITLE>My Page</TITLE>
<META name="description" content="Everything you
wanted to know about stamps, from prices to history.">
<META name="keywords" content="stamps, stamp collecting,
stamp history, prices, stamps for sale">
</HEAD>
If you choose our Stealth Redirection feature, you can enter a
title, description and keywords as part of the set up process.
We then use this information to create meta tags for your website,
included within the Stealth frame. It is entirely up to you whether
or not you use the meta tags our Stealth feature adds, your own
meta tags, or a combination of both.
Note that some search engines will use the "description" meta
tag as their short summary of your domain, so if you use that tag
make sure you enter text that is attractive and informative.
Meta Refresh
Some search engines, such as Yahoo, object to pages that use an
HTML feature called "meta refresh". Meta refresh is often
used to redirect a site's visitors to another site after a certain
amount of time. None of our web features rely on meta refresh,
so this restriction will not cause you any difficulty.
More Information
You can use search engines to find websites dedicated to explaining
search engine technology in more detail. The Spider's Apprentice
and Search Engine Watch are both valuable resources.
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