| The
terms and definitions below relate to most aspects
of search engine indexing and ranking of websites. |
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Spider
/ Bot: |
A
program used by search engines to visit and index
websites. Search engines regularly send these
spiders to the sites in their database and new
sites that were submitted to verify accuracy of
the index. |
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Ranking: |
When
a user types in a keyword in a search engine,
the response usually contains a list of websites
which the search engine determines to be most
relevant. The list of sites appears in the order
of their relevance (ranking). There could be thousands
of matching choices, so to generate any traffic,
your site should be in at least the top 30. |
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Page
Title: |
The
single most important line of text at the top
of each web page identifying the name of the page
or the entire site. The page title often determines
how search engines index and rank a website. The
page title should be short and to the point. |
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Domain
Name: |
A
domain name is almost as important as the page
title, as most search engines give higher rankings
to sites with domain names relevant to their content.
This is another reason why having a good domain
name is extremely important to the success of
your site. It is also recommended
that you have multiple domain names forwarded
to your website, as different domain names increase
the odds of search engines indexing your site
under more topics and keywords. Our US and UK
domains are available for registering most easy
names, such as common dictionary words and phrases,
to substantially increase the ranking of your
site in any given category. For example, if your
domain name is myjewelrystore.com, you could register
jewelry.us.vu, and your site should place higher
than other sites with longer names, under the
keyword "jewelry". |
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Meta
Tags: |
Meta
tags are embedded into web pages and are invisible
to users. They are only visible to search engine
spiders and assist them in determining the relevant
nature of a website's content. Each page of a
website that you want listed on search engines
must have meta tags. |
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Description
Tag: |
A
meta tag listing the description of a web page.
The description tag should be no more than two
sentences long, and describe the exact purpose
of the website. |
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Keyword
Tag: |
A
meta tag listing the relevant keywords a user
may enter when trying to find a specific category
on a search engine. You should have no more than
18 unique keywords or short phrases separated
by commas, with any single word never repeated
more than 7 times. |
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Page
Text: |
The
body of text on a webpage is also very important
in search engine ranking. Most search engines
can only read text on a page, not images, java
applets or embedded objects. This is why sometimes
the most plain looking website will be ranked
before a fancy, graphics based site. Therefore,
try to have more relevant text (matching your
keywords, description and page title) wherever
possible. |
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Popularity: |
Another
factor used by search engines for ranking is site
popularity on the Internet. This is the number
of links to your site on other websites. The only
way to achieve this is to be listed on as many
search engines as possible. |
