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gessosaxman
Posts: 49
Joined: 8/11/2005
Status: offline
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Search engines - 9/30/2005 15:32:28
Ok, in the discussions about my site, this subject has come up several times. so now I have a couple questions about that.
1.) Do search engines only look at the page marked as index?
2.) When they look at a page to they scan the text looking for the key words?
3.) Are there any tricks to improving ones chance of getting hits with search engines?
As always, you guys are very helpful, and very patient with my limited knowledge, and stupid questions.
Matt N.
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womble
Posts: 5726
Joined: 3/14/2005
From: Living on the edge
Status: offline
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RE: Search engines - 10/1/2005 17:42:00
Alt tags (alternative) are displayed if for any reason the image doesn't load, and are read out by screen readers). They're simply added into the img tag in the code, e.g.
<img src="/images/pic1.gif height="50" width="50" alt="picture of a widget" />
To add them in FP you can either add it in manually in code/split view, or in design view double-click the image to bring up the 'picture properties' box. On the 'general' tab in that there's a section called 'alternative representations' and a box that says 'text'. That's where you type the text you want in the alt tag.
<H1> tags are heading tags, <H1> being the top level heading, which as Tailslide said, there should be only one of on each page (usually the main heading on the page). By default it's the biggest font visually, though you can change that either using css or in FP.
Starting a page from scratch, to make text a <H1>, pick 'heading 1' from the 'style' drop down list on the toolbar (on the left hand side) (you can change the font/size etc. by using the drop down boxes on the toolbar). On a pre-existing page, you can use the quick tag editor. If you highlight some text a list of tags that apply to that selection appears just under the page tabs (in FP2003 anyhow), e.g. <body>, <div>, <table> etc. If you hover over it, a little arrow appears on the right of the tag, and if you click on that it brings up a drop-down list of options. That can get a little complicated though knowing what to change where if you don't know too much html. The best option's probably to delete the text you want as a <h1> heading, select 'heading 1' from the drop-down style list, and re-type the text.
On submitting to SEs, there are loads of companies out there who claim to submit your site to 100's of SE's but I don't think they're generally worth it. It's the biggies you need to get indexed by (and of course Google's the biggest of them all), as most of the smaller SEs are fed by the biggies anyhow. With some hosting packages you can submit your site to SEs through your host. For example I can submit to a number of SEs through my control panel. SEs also spider sites. It doesn't happen overnight, but that's one of the reasons why links from other sites are important, because SE spiders follow the links from other pages to yours. You can submit manually to each SE - the method differs between the SEs - somewhere on their sites they'll tell you how to do it.
According to my SE book (not sure how up to date it is), the important ones are Google, Yahoo, The Open Directory Project, and Teoma/Ask Jeeves (and possibly MSN).
You can tell if your site's indexed by going to the SE and for example for Google, in the search box, typing "site:yourdomain.com" (where 'yourdomain.com' is your domain address). That'll bring up all the pages on that domain Google has indexed. For Yahoo, go to dir.yahoo.com, and just type "yourdomain.com" in the search box and select the 'directory' option. (I've just tried it on Google for your site and it's coming up with 127 results, though most of those seem to be the forum - not a lot else is indexed yet).
Also, as I mentioned before, you might want to read the tutorial on how to set up a robots.txt file. That's used to tell SEs which pages to ignore, index and whether or not to follow links.
Okay, that's just about the extent of my SEO knowledge - hope it helps - and I'm sure the SEO geeks experts will be along to correct me if I'm wrong 
_____________________________
~~ "A cruel god ain't no god at all" ~~
~~ Erase hate. Practice love. ~~
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