20/20 Technologies presents:

Promotion Secrets of the Web Gurus exposed

This document is a collection of advanced web promotion tips and tricks. We assume that you already have a basic understanding of the large search engines, how to submit to them, and the basic techniques suggested by the search engines themselves. Our goal here is to teach you a few tricks that the search engines don't tell you.

"Related Words" and Search Engines

Not so long ago, you could force your way to the top of a search engine for a particular search (lets say tents) simply by making a page that said "tents" a few thousand times. You've probably run into pages like this yourself, often you see a difficult to read block of text that looks like this:

tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents tents

Fortunately for all of us, things are not so out of hand now. The big search engines now all employ different strategies at weeding out pages which pretend to be about a subject, but really aren't.

The new strategy held by all the large engines is that if you mention the word tents you better also mention some words which one would expect to see on the same page. Perhaps camping or outdoor would make sense.

So now the goal of creating a high-ranking page reduces to finding various keywords, and including them in the body text, meta tags, alt tags, link names, headings, etc.

But what's the best way? Fortunately, the search engines come to our rescue again. Many of them now have features where they tell you the related words that they compute. For example, see the Excite search for tents and look at the top of the page. They prove a list of keywords. At the time of this writing, the keywords are tent, jsb, vestibule, camping, canopies, outfitter, backpacks, tenting, marquees, and tented. Would you have guessed even half of those words?

Does this mean that the search engines have a huge thesaurus, and they are so educated to know what a tent is? Heavens, no! They simply understand associations based on the pure statistics of word frequency. Very often, they get it completely wrong--or find connections that are loose, and sometimes very funny. (E.g., I searched for country music and it suggested trailor park?!) Finding these quirky but statistically relevant words can be a valuable tool in making your page appeal to the eyes of the spider.

So my suggestion is to use those words, or at least most of them, in your HTML. However, actually use them--don't just repeat them in a small font at the bottom of the page. The search engines get smarter every day, and they can tell what parts of the page are real English sentences and which parts are gobbledy-goop.

When you submit to AltaVista, you will find that they have a very similar feature with their refine ability. By polling the various engines you can derive a fairly comprehensive list of hot words to use in your promotion efforts.

Let's use the above words from Excite to craft a good paragraph using a lot of various keywords, but not overdoing it.

You've seen our names on the marquees of fine tenting stores everywhere. We have outdoor canopies, tented vestibules, and all manner of camping acessories for your backpacks. We are the outfitter of many a sportsman and hunter, with a tent for every purpose.

Sounds cheesy, but it might be effective. This might provide a good "description" tag or a block of text near the top.

The Trick to Scoring High: Don't Score Too High!

I don't know if the paragraph above will truly score well for "tents." (If you came to this page searching for "tents" then I guess you know the answer!) The problem is, that one cannot possibly sit down and know ahead of time that a page will score reasonably well. This is because of a clever tactic the search engines use to rid their index of cheaters.

They install a rule, at the very end of the scoring process, which basically says this: If the score is greater than N%, reduce the score by a substantial penalty. It's as if the search engines are saying that any document that could score that well for such a simple search must be a contrivance--a cheat page--and therefore should be pushed lower on the list, because confidence in the document has dropped.

This can be very frustrating, as the webmaster who tries to rank his pages highly discovers that engines will disregard pages that "try too hard" to be highly ranked! If you were to take the advice here too far, and saturate the text with keywords so that there was little left over, your page will rank so highly that the search engines can reasonably assume you "cheated" to construct the page. This is exactly why I stress that you should use the words only in real sentences. That is not cheating, that is prose! And that's exactly what the search engines are getting better and better at detecting.

So the problem is that your page might score either too well, or not well enough. Since it sometimes takes a month to even see your page in the index, it's quite unreasonable to make minor page adjustments every few weeks in hope of an improvement in ranking later. It's especially unsettling when you wait weeks to see your new ranking, and it drops! For this reason, what I strong suggest is to take 4-5 pages on the site and use the tactics described here, only to varying extents.

For example, your pages might work like this:

On the first page (perhaps the Home Page) you could use all of the keywords you extracted from all of the engines, and use them to a high degree. Put them all in the <META> tags, and use your most important keywords more.
On a different page, use only the Excite keywords, and don't use <META> tags at all (Excite hates them). This time, try using your most important keyword only once or twice and saturate the related words.
On still a different page, with a very small amount of text, drop a few of the keywords in place. Some engines like pages that don't have much to say.

On all the other pages... keep being creative! Remember, there is no "one solution" to what makes a page rank highly. You need to take all of the principles you have learned, and spread them around, to increase the chances of you scoring #1.

You will find that some engines will disregard some of your pages, and not others. Some will score all of the pages highly. Look at it like a numbers game, and by spreading your strategies around, you are eventually going to get lucky. (And don't let any webmaster tell you that there isn't luck involved with getting to the top of the engines, because there is!)

If all this sounds like a lot of work, you're right! But the payoff can be big. If you have other things to worry about, like running your business, consider the choice that many successful webmasters have made: 20/20 Technologies. Our staff of promotion gurus have implemented ingenious promotional strategies to turn stagnant sites into bustling cybercommunities.

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