Search Engines
I listed myself with several search engines but there is one thing you all need to know about. There is a code or rather a tag on your web page and you need to edit it with keywords. Its called the meta tag and it helps all the little search engines find your site when someone puts in a query.
To list or promote your website just go to any search engine like yahoo or excite and put in these keywords(without the quotes) "search engines" and do a search for all the companies where you can list your website for no $$$. Some will list a broad range where you will have to spend alittle "butt time" looking for ones that cover a few search engines.
Yahoo's main page is www.yahoo.com
Pattie
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Web sites are submitted to search engines at their sites. For instance, go to Infoseek.com and scroll to the bottom where it says "Add URL". Click on that and enter your URL in the space given. Before posting this, I checked at a few others (Excite, Altavista) and saw that they've made it a bit harder to find. I heard on NPR yesterday how web "Portals" are trying to become web "destinations" and trying to keep people in their sites, so you have to dig a little deeper to find what you're looking for. But it's usually in the form of "Add URL" or "Submit URL".
Yahoo is a little different (it's not technically a search engine but a web index) in that you have to go to numerous levels, deep into their index to the location where your site fits in (Art/Commercial/Illustration/...) before you can actually submit the
URL.
Pattie mentioned Meta Tags which are very important. To get your site anywhere near the top of the list of thousands of pages, Meta Tags helps distinguish your site from others. These are tags which go between the Head tags of your page. They are not seen on the site, but are read by search engines. For an example of Meta Tags, you can look at the source code of my home page or (I assume) Pattie's. In case you don't know how to do that, just go to one of the sites, then select File/Save As and when given the choice between text and source, choose source. Save the file on your computer and open it in a text program.
Kelly
http://home.earthlink.net/~kellycheek
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links to places to submit to search engines
http://www.submit-it.com
http://www.addurl.com
http://www.mmgco.com/top100.html
http://www.virtualpromote.com/
Jackie
http://www.jdart.com
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Date: Wed, 08 Jul 1998 10:28:17 +0000
From: art@visionqueststudio.com
Subject: illustration: Listing/Promoting your website, etc.
Here's some URL's for places that will submit your URL for free to several search engines (note: they also offer programs that will submit to more and maintain them for a period of time for a fee - hey, that's how they stay in business :-))
ADD ME http://www.addme.com/
REGISTER IT http://www.register-it.com/avt/
AddURL http://www.addurl.com/
SUBMIT IT http://www.submit-it.com
WEB PROMOTE http://www.webpromote.com
At each of them, they have tips and explanations on how to get traffic to your site, etc., and also list other similar locations you can go to to add your URL
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE:
**Here's 2 great URLs for an overview about website promotion for artists - lots of good info, links, art listing sites, etc. (the "What the sam hill all this is about" and "why in the world you'd want to now learn all this too") ;-)
SELLING YOUR ART ONLINE by Chris Maher
http://www.1x.com/advisor/index.html
STUDIO & GALLERY WEB PROMOTION
http://post-dogmatist-arts.net/academy/
Bookmark these as you will find yourself needing to return and get more info.
Plan to spend HOURS doing all this submitting though. :-P And you have to keep ON doing it too. Checking back with search engines to make sure your site is on there.
Those Meta Tags mentioned previously are VITAL!! - for the little robots the engines send out across the web to check for your site, etc.
Also, the more other sites you link with the better. (Yes, the little robots see that too) We all help each other that way. So you might want to start planning an art links page for your site too. And keeping a list of them now. (Actually I like this community building aspect of this technology). ;-)
Denise (R)
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Check out the Search Engine Watch web site at
http://searchenginewatch.com/ and specifically
http://searchenginewatch.com/webmasters/meta.html
Everything you've ever wanted to know about search engines and meta tags.
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But I found a site that was a good source of info about search engines. I found it throught the 'Submit It!' site. The url: http://submitit.linkexchange.com/subopt.htm#Q1
It explained a lot to me and why it's important to have some clear wording at the top of your home page on what your site is about. Also, there is a link there that will let you sign on with 7 of the biggies (all at one time so no searching each engine for the 'add url' link).
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Date: Fri, 18 Sep 98 08:09:10 +0000
From: Mark Betcher
Subject: illustration: more meta
Alta Vista - References first 30 words on page for description unless you use META TAGS. Alta Vista determines the priority of matches by indexing the words closest to the beginning of the front page.
Infoseek - Indexes the first 200 characters of your site after the HTML BODY tag unless you use METATAGS in the creation of your site. Your description can include up to 200 characters of text.
Lycos - engine compares each page to your query and gives higher scores to pages that contain the words as you typed them into your Web Site. It also looks for pages that mention these words early on, rather than far down.
Yahoo - searches for words in URL, title & description (20 words) YOU ENTERED when submitting URL!
Webcrawler - Webcrawler computes its confidence rating by considering how many times the terms in your search occur in that document. The more frequent, the more relevant.
A sample HTML code with MetaTags added. You can copy and paste the code below and then fill in your TITLE, KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION. Sepatate them with comas. Keep up to 10 keywords and 25 words description, or some engines may reject it.
-------------------------------------
<HTML> <HEAD>
<TITLE>YOUR SITE TITLE</TITLE>
<META NAME=3D"description" CONTENT=3D"your description">
<META NAME=3D"keywords" CONTENT=3D"your keywords">
</HEAD>
The Meta Description tag should contain a concise description of your page and the services or information it features. If you're lucky, the contents of your description Meta tag will be associated with your URL if it comes up in search engine results. Without it, your web page description will be left up to the whim of spiders which seem to prefer generating garbled, illegible and inappropriate HTML code as a summary of your page. We recommend that you keep your description under 20 words. If it's too long it will simply be truncated.
The Meta Keywords tag is intended to contain keywords or key phrases that you think people potentially interested in your site might be searching for at the engines. Each word or phrase should be separated by a comma followed by a single space. Some word repetition is permissible but don't push your luck - many engines are actually penalizing sites which overuse keywords. Excessive keyword repetition, known as "spamming", can result in your pages getting lower relevancy to searches, or being banned from the search engine altogether (if you really go too far). For fairly obvious reasons, it is not in the best interest of the engine to allow such spamming to go unchecked.
Mark Betcher
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Here's a thought for the meta tags.
Make sure they are KEY words that someone would use if they were doing a search for a web site pertaining to your subject matter.
Since I have a commercial site (.com) and am paying for a web log - I get info from the log that tells me what words each search engine is using to identify my site contents with.
You need to be specific - just list words on the content header of your HTML code - for example on my needlepoint site page header - needlepoint, needlepoint design, hand painted needlepoint and so on. I put key words on every "page" of my web site.
I've done searches on my site with different words and it's interesting how I'm indexed - one came up under "matroishka dolls" because I have designs on the subject but not key words - another came up under "Silk gauze" because I have it as a subject on several pages.
One very interesting "keyword" several friends said they typed in my name to search engines and my needlepoint site came up!!!
One of the industry trade journals (writer) called me a few months ago because she said my site came up when she did a needlepoint design search - this resulted in one of those side box articles (inside a bigger article) about my web site and quotes from the "interview" on having web sites in the needlework/craft industry. This one small article generated over 75 or more leads for shops. Pretty nice considering it was purely by chance due to a web search.
Lula
http://www.woolydream.com
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