End the confusion of a Newbie

[Jastor]

I am new to this web site promotion thing. I stumbled on to this search engine discussion forum last night, and since then I have been reading and learning a lot.

I started my company a little over a year ago. My expertise lies in networking. I am in no way a programmer or web site developer, but since I am trying to save money, I did my web site myself.

My site, http://www.gambitsystems.net, is basically all HTML with a pinch of java script for the navigation menu. The site uses frames. Based on what information I was able to piece together about search engines, I tried to optimize my site as best I could.

I used Title, Keywords, Description, and Robots Meta Tags. I tried to use key words in my img alt tags as well.

Here is the evolution of how I started trying to get my site listed in the various search engines:

I submitted my site to the Open Directory Project and am happy to say I got into that one. I also managed to get into the Yahoo! directory. I have been regularly submitting my site to Lycos, Hotbot, MSN, AllTheWeb, Altavista, Direct Hit, and Google. I had been submitting my site to Web Crawler and Excite before they were acquired by Overture. I also had been submitting my site to Northern Light before their ownership changed. I submitted my site to Jayde, Scrubtheweb, and Joeant.

I have also been regularly submitting my site through submitexpress.com and search.com.

After learning about some of the major indexes and directories that seem to feed results to all of the top search engines, I did the following:

I paid to have my site listed in the Inktomi.
I paid to have my site included in Fast Search (Alltheweb).

I am thinking very seriously about paying for inclusion in LookSmart. I know that many of the posted threads to this forum indicate that LookSmart is a good idea for getting into MSN. However, LookSmart's site claims to have many other parters besides MSN.

On Looksmart's site they claim to reach 77% of Internet users. Who exactly, besides MSN, are their partners?

I rarely use the MSN search myself and I personally know very few people that use it as opposed to some other directory like Yahoo!. So is it really that effective???

I am thinking about Teoma / Ask Jeeves site submit. Is this one worth it?

Besides, Pay-Per-Click and the things I have already done, what more can I do?

I am very unsure as to how all of the search engines and indexes listed above are connected. I know that Inktomi feeds several search engines. I know that Fast Search feeds Lycos and Alltheweb. I know that Google and Yahoo are connected in some way, but how I am not sure. I know that MSN get's results from both Inktomi and Looksmart. Beyond that, I am very confused. :confused:

I apologize for the length of this post, but I just had to ask someone my questions. I am tired of reading through the marketing hype on so many search engine and site submission company web sites.

Any advice that anyone has to help me would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks :p

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums Jastor! :hi:

OH MY. What a Mouth-Full!!

When I have more time, I will answer some of your questions. In the meantime, most of your questions are answered in the individual forums in here.

I will answer a little later. I am also sure other members will peck away at your questions as well. :)

[ihelpyou]

Okay. to answer the Looksmart thing. My thoughts are they are very important to get your url into.

MSN is the default search engine that is installed on most new PC's sold out there. That is why it is soooo important.

If you get into Looksmart, MSN's first results come from the LS directory as long as the search term is fairly popular enough that MSN has results from it.

If the term is not popular, MSN uses Inktomi for it's secondary results.

Here is an example:

http://search.msn.com/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&v=1&q=ihelpyou

The "web directory sites" results at the top are from Looksmart.

The 'web page' results are from Inktomi

You can see why Looksmart is important.

[kneelsit]

:hi: Welcome to the forums Jastor.

What Doug has said about Looksmart is spot on. Very few people use Looksmart itself but because it feeds MSN (and others) with its results then it IS important to be listed with them.

I agree that I would not personally bother using MSN to do any searching but there are millions of new computer owners out there who have just bought their computers already loaded with Internet Explorer and the associated MSN Search Engine. Which SE are they likely to use first up.?

By the way, congratulations on getting listed in Yahoo. Did you get listed with them before they started charging their rip-off
annual fees?

If you click on the term search engines and/or submissions in these forums you will get a heap of info on which engines are worth submitting to.

All the best
Greg

[lots0cash]

Welcome to the forums Jastor

It sounds to me like your in all the SE’s/Directories you need to be, except for LookSmart/M$N. If I were you I would quit wasting time (money?) on re-submitting to the SE’s and it is a definite no no to keep resubmitting to directories.

I am not a SEO pro but I do believe your time would be better spent optimizing your site for the SE’s. I took a quick look at your site and saw several things that could be causing you some problems with SE rankings.

First - I found this tag in your head section
<MEAT NAME="robots" CONTENT="index, nofollow">
This needs to be fixed or IMO removed. You also need to target some keywords (what keywords/phrases are you targeting?). After reading the first two paragraphs of your main page I did not know what your site was about – If your site were optimized I should have known what your site was about after reading the first sentence.

Hope this helps

[ihelpyou]

Yes, I just noticed this:
I have been regularly submitting my site to Lycos, Hotbot, MSN, AllTheWeb, Altavista, Direct Hit, and Google.
ONE time is all that is necessary. Actually, I can't remember when the last time was that I submitted ANY page or site to Google. hmmmm, maybe one year ago?

Ya don't submit to regular search engines. You optimize and wait.

[kneelsit]

Attempting to properly leverage technology to support an organization's needs is often one of the most frustrating and stressful experiences you can ever have.

Jastor - Do you mean something like "Ever feel like throwing your *%#* computer out the window?? We will catch it for you and fix it!!"

Remember the old KISS formula and writing to the level of a twelve year old (comprehension-wise that is)

When I went in to your home page (source) all I could see was coding to set the frames, there was no text whatsoever, therefore the robots see nothing when they crawl your site so why should they bother including your site in their index.?

Get rid of the frames - are they really necessary??

I am no expert but I think many of the clued-up SEOs here will back up what I am saying.

Greg

[Jastor]

Thank You ...... Everyone for your replies to my post.

You gave me a lot of good advice. I went ahead and paid for inclusion in the Looksmart directory.

For right now, since I don't know ASP or some other web development language, I'm going to keep using the frames on the site so I won't have to recode the navigation menu on every page when I make a change. I did however, place a link on each page to reload the site should someone initially hit a page other than the index page. I then adjusted the robots meta tag to allow to <index, follow>.

I'm going to look at rewording some things like Kneelsit suggested. I also am going to pay more attention to targeting key words like lotsOcash suggested, but it's going to take me some time.

Doug, I didn't know that it's a bad thing to continually resubmit a site to search engines and directories. I thought that given the fact that they do not guarantee site submission, and the fact that sometimes SE's may or may not update their databases regularly, that resubmission was a must. I'm glad to know that I don't have to waste any more of my time resubmitting.

In answer to kneelsit's question about how I got onto Yahoo .....
I was mentioning to a friend of mine that I really wanted to get my site into Yahoo!. He said that he had managed to get into Yahoo! fairly quickly. He told me that he submitted his site through their regional directory section, meaning he didn't just submit his site to some category under B2B. He actually navigated deep into their directory structure down to the regional level and then submitted his site. I did the same thing and I received an e-mail within a week afterwards informing me that I had been accepted into the directory. I don't know if this approach still works, but it is worth a try.

If you find my site on Yahoo!, you will see that it is located at the following location in the Yahoo! directory: Florida>Largo>Computer Consulting.

Any more suggestions you guys can provide on my site would be greatly appreciated. There were a couple of other questions in my original post that I still need to find the answers to. I will keep looking through the other posts in several of the forums, but any further answers would be helpful, even if someone lets me know where in the forum to look.

In any case, thanks for the help.

:p

[Blue]

Hi Jastor,

Yes, as stated above, you need to concentrate on good keyword rich copy. However, that's not yet the main problem.

As Kneelsit mentioned, all he could see was the frames on your front page. Well, unfortunately, this is all the spiders will see too (do a "View" - "Source" in IE or a "View" - "Page Source" in NN to see this). You need to incorporate a < noframes > < /noframes >tag utilizing all your keyword rich copy.

You'll never rank well until you do this. I beleive Jill (Advisor in these forums) has posted on this subject a few times. If you do a search for noframes in these forums, you'll find some good info.

Also, she has discussed this topic in her High Rankings' Advisor (http://www.highrankings.com/advisor.htm) newsletter. You'll have to peruse the backissues. I would highly recommend that you subscribe.

[kneelsit]

Yes Jastor as Blue says - sort out the frames/no frames issue first and fix your copy - try reading it to a young friend and see how they react - if they say "Duhh" then go back and re-write,
again and again. THEN think about submission to DMOZ for inclusion in google etc.


Good luck

[Kal]

Hi Jastor :hi:

There is a fabulous tutorial on how to create a No Frames tag here: http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/frames.html

[Jastor]

Greetings! :D

First off, I want to thank everyone for the great advice. Kal, I really appreciated your last post. That <NO FRAMES> tutorial was exactly what I needed.

I still need to modify the textual content of the site to make liberal use of key words and to simplify the message. So far, I think I have made a pretty good amount of progress. I have done the following:

1.) I paid for submission into LookSmart
2.) I included a HOME link on each of the content pages
3.) I made use of the <NO FRAMES> tag
4.) I included some Java Script to maintain frame context
5.) I modified the ROBOTS Metatag to <INDEX, FOLLOW>

If anyone has any other helpful hints or advice, I would appreciate it. I hope the changes I have made will have a positive effect on my rankings fairly soon. But, either way I think my site is already much improved.

Once again, thank you to everyone for your help and advice.

:happy:

[Kal]

You're very welcome Jastor - that's what these forums are for: information sharing. Your site's looking better already :thumb:

[kneelsit]

Jastor,

See you have some great text in the page now, but why hide it in the html section where your visitors can't see it? Or is this only a temporary stage?

It’s a real drag on any business or organization when there are computer problems - - -

Just two other suggestion.

1.Can you get a nice sharp image of a computer keyboard to replace the very fuzzy one - does not impress as a professional type of image you would want to project for your company.

2. Its always a good idea to put up your physical address as well as phone, email etc. Makes a would-be customer feel a little more confident in possibly proceeeding further.


Keep at it you'll get there.

[Jastor]

Kneelsit,

I'll reply to your last post in a little bit. I actually spent some time earlier today replying and when I went to subit the reply it appeared as though my login session on the forum had timed out and I lost my whole reply. It took me probably a good 20 minutes of typing too.

Man did that tick me off. It's the second or third time that I have had that happen. :mad:

I do have to ask .........

HAS ANYONE HEARD OF SPLATSEARCH??? :confused:

http://www.splatsearch.com/

[ihelpyou]

I tried the splat thing but it did not work and showed an error.

[MsSearch]

I kept getting an error too....and there was a flashing banner (casino ad) that was really ANNOYING!!!

[Jastor]

Here's my long ago promised post to this thread.

Once, again I appreciate everyone's good advice.

Kneelsit,

In answer to your last post.

I am happy to say that I had a graphics designer put together some new images for my site. They look much better than the old ones.

Kneelsit, you asked in your previous post:

See you have some great text in the page now, but why hide it in the html section where your visitors can't see it? Or is this only a temporary stage?

Yes, the text on the index page is definitely a temporary stage, however, it is not meant to be hidden.

When I have finished drafting content that not only maintains the same message as my existing "visible content". but also is properly keyword optimized, I will post the same content to both my content pages and my index pages.

Though they will eventually be the same, the primary purpose of the text on the index page that lies between the <NOFRAMES> tags is for search engine robots to index my content and cawl my site links. This is necessary because search engine robots are not frames aware. As a result, they can only see content that is located between the <NOFRAMES> tags.

When people visit my site, they should be viewing my content pages within the proper frame context. (i.e. the title frame on top, the navigation menu below the title frame on the left, and the site content below the tiltle frame and to the right of the navigation menu.)

I hope that makes sense.

It will take my a while to finalize my content though. I plan on posting the new content on my index pages first, so that I can test the effects on my Search Engine ranking before I go and change my main content pages.

Even though I plan on writing the content in a somewhat simpler fashion, I think the current content is at least coherent and understandable. I don't want to change my content pages till I am satisfied with the changes.

I don't want my content to be changing every other day. I personally find it annoying when web site designers keep publishing changes before they are in their final form. It's almost like they are forcing their viewers to muddle through an ever changing work in progress. Site content must change from time to time, but I want my site to maintain a sense of stability and consistency. That's just my personal point of view.

Thanks for the great advice. When I am done making all of my changes I will let you know. I will both value and appreciate your opinion as to whether the proposed new content is simple, coherent, and properly keyword optimized.

[kneelsit]

Hi Jastor,

Yeaah the new image looks much more professional.

Got your message about the frames/no frames. Personally I don't use them, though I can see the advantage from the navigation point of view.

Sorry I still don't like your opening paragraph.

remember the KISS formula and write as if you were addressing a 12 year old.

[Jastor]

I agree with you Greg.

I will changing the content soon.

I will definitely remember the KISS formula.

[Chris_D]

- Jastor - that Splat 'engine' is pure pay per click advertising - and not even with any real search results to pad it out on the terms I tested!!

- kneelsit - as another aussie - the 'looksmart is MSN' stuff is true in the .com versions - but here in Oz the .com.au versions of looksmart / ninemsn /yahoo - and their relationships - are different to to the .com versions. Try your keywords in the these 3 - in both .com.au and .com - analyse where they are coming from - and you'll see what I mean....

Sorry - just in a rush, I'll post more 'politely' next time. :)

[Jastor]

I've done quite a bit of work on Optimizing my site, www.gambitsystems.net.

Kal,

I read every single article that you have posted on these forums.

They have been very helpful.

Jill,

I have read quite a bit of the past information that you have posted on these forums as well. I learned a lot.

Doug,

I got a lot of great information from some of your posts also.

I hope I did everything properly.

I used Word Tracker to research my keywords.

I then rewrote the content on my web site and changed my page titles and meta tags.

I tried to incorporate my researched keywords and phrases wherever they made sense, while still maintaining the original message of my site.

I also tried to simplify the language a bit.

What do you guys think of the changes? Does my site appear to be properly optimized?

You guys weren't kidding about how much time it takes to research the keywords and rework the site.

Thanks for all the great advice. I'm looking forward to your comments about my site.

[Matt B]

Jastor,

Don't worry about using frames, they can be easily overcome. I am not a frames cheerleader, but when I came to work at an agency that used frames extensively for navigation and active content, I had to deal with them. Framed sites take a little more work and some creative planning to make it come off, but it is well worth it.
After many meetings with my programmers and give and take on both sides we created a spam-free, user-friendly system. We have no problems getting our sites and deep content indexed by crawlers, in fact, I have had more success marketing framed sites than standard HTML.

Good Luck!

[Jastor]

Thanks for the encouragement SEO Guy. :)

[kneelsit]

:) Great work Jastor - much cleaner, especially the graphics.

Couple of final suggestions:-

1. Give your text plenty of white space; IMO 150% line spacing makes it easier to read. Particularly the bulletted section.

2. Keep refining and simplifying, eliminate ALL unnecessary words
remember KISS!!

I am still trying to improve my own site after 5 years. :D

[Jastor]

Thanks a lot Kneelsit :p

I'm trying to remember the KISS formula. To tell you the truth I have a hard time writing simply. I feel like I'm trying to revert back to grade school. :D

Your posts throughout this thread have been very helpful. I really appreciate it.

Thanks

[kneelsit]

Jastor,
I know it is difficult to " KEEP IT SIMPLE STUPID "
I just love using words correctly and the nuances of the English language but it is de rigeur when writing for the web - particularly sales copy.