Improve Your Gay Website's Search Engine Listing
This short tutorial will show you how to improve your gay website's search engine listing in the search engines in less than 5 minutes. How long the search engine in question takes to index your site is another matter.
Many people who are just starting out building websites and submitting them to search engines miss out on a lot of good traffic because their sites simply aren't made ready for search engines.
What follows, is the basics that are needed for a web page to be properly indexed by a search engine.
The first step and the the easiest step in getting your website to be listed properly in a search engine is to create meta tags. Meta tags are usually the first thing that a search engine reads and stores in it's database.
Meta tags are placed in the header section of your webpage and are not visible to people who are reading your web page, but are clearly visible to a search engine's spider or robot.
Meta Tag Example:
<head> The Title Tag and the Meta Tags are placed between these two tags </head>
<title>Your Unique Page Title</title>
<meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="This is where your web page description goes.">
<meta name="KEYWORDS" content="Relevant keyword/phrase 1, Relevant keyword/phrase 2, Relevant keyword/phrase 3, etc...">
Notes on the Title Tag: In many cases this is the most important tag. Don't leave the title field blank. Titles that say things like, "Welcome to my website", "index", "Warning", "Default", "Document", etc...don't do anything to help you. About 12 words maximum or 60 to 115 characters is plenty; anything more and it will probably get chopped automatically by the search engine's parser.
Notes on the Description Tag: This is where you would place a descriptive and compelling keyword rich sentance or two. Like the other tags, it should reflect the actual content of the specific page. Generally, 200 to 250 characters may be indexed, though only a smaller portion of this amount may be displayed.
Notes on the Keywords Tag: Separate each word with a comma. Keep the keywords or keyword phrases relevant to the specific page. Most search engines find the "Keyword Tag" the least relevant of all meta tags because of abuse. However, many will still grab the information in this field anyway as as sort of a back-up. About 25 keywords or keyword phrases should be plenty.
Notes on Page Text: Search engines love text. That's how they read any given page. If your page is nothing but images or if its a Flash type page then you're going to run into difficulties as the search engine will have very little to go on. The first step is to add relevant and readable text onto your page. There are other strategies that you should also consider, if your site is primarily composed of images or Flash but that's beyond the scope of this little tutorial.
Get Links Into Your Site: Lastly, the thing that every website needs in order to get noticed by both search engines and people alike, are links into your site. The more links in, the more likely you're going to raise to the top of the search engine heap. And, the more links in, the more likely people are going to find your site from sources other than search engines. This is particularly important, since search engine listings come and go.
This has been a basic intro to preparing your gay website for successful indexing by search engines. There is a lot more to consider. You can find out more about search engines and search engine optimization by visiting Search Engine Watch.
