Today's research project was to figure out why ITLnet wasn't listed when you did a search for Oklahoma Internet Service Providers. Well to my shock and surprise, I did a stupid. Yes even I, the splendiferous Program Witch, do a stupid every once in a while.
When I designed the latest version of the ITLnet web site I forgot to put something in. I had completely left out that ITLnet was an Internet Service Provider (ISP). No where on any of the pages did the words Internet Service Provider appear. I didn't even have the letters ISP. So this whole time Google, Yahoo, or whoever where crawling the pages, never found those three words.
How embarrassing is that!
So what have we learned Charlie Brown?
- Be sure to have the important words on your pages. The higher on the page the better.
- Be sure to have descriptive text inside all of your ALT and TITLE elements. Image links do you no good without that information.
- To be ranked higher, have people link back to you. So if you are building web sites, be sure to give your self credit with a link back to your page.
- Some dynamically built pages (ones with a "?" in their link) might be ignored.
- Create a site map; especially include those dynamically built pages. This way they will get crawled. ( I need to do this both here and ITLnet)
(Side note: That's why I added the "Link" button on my blog entries, otherwise they would never be crawled. [a permalink if you will]) - Go register your pages by hand with Google, Yahoo and whoever. Don't rely on your page to be hunted down.
- Play the waiting game. After all that, it could be weeks before you have results.
- And finally, go spend the money and get some advertising with Google. (The upper ups are talking that one over.)