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Friday, March 29, 2002 Issue 12 - ePhilanthropy eZine   VOLUME 2 ISSUE 12  
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CONTENTS
Special IRS Publication Will Address eReceipts
Nonprofit Survey on IRS Electronic Filing
Stanford University
New York, NY- ePhilanthropy Training Tour
Getting Listed High Up In the Search Engines
Indianapolis, IN- ePhilanthropy Training Tour
Blackbaud Launches Free Self-Service Nonprofit Career Site
Getting Listed High Up In the Search Engines
http://www.kndpublishing.com
by Skinner, Kim

GETTING LISTED HIGH UP IN THE SEARCH ENGINES
by Kim Skinner

It's one thing to know how to get your site listed in the directory, or search engine, but how do you get people to remember your name? As they said in that highly contagious Cheers theme, "Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name." Well, if you recall, no one new ever showed up. SO, unless you want some 'Cliff Clavin' and 'Norm' types to be your only visitors, listen up. And, unless your name is known by everyone in the free-world, you have to work to get people to your site, so consider the following.

Most Search Engines sort sites, based on the alphabet. Even more engines list, within each individual search, based on what letter appears first. Therefore, what's most important is getting the people to your site. THEN, you can hammer home your name and message. But to get them in the door, you have to play the game with the rules of the Engines.

What this means, is, if your had the unfortunate lack of vision to choose the Site title, "Xylophones, Xylophones, Oh Lordy We've Got Xylophones" you have 2 problems. First, you need a pet, but more importantly, you need to change that title, NOW. The closer your site title is to the letter "A", the better your site will score when most searches are returned.

*Note* Beginning a Site Title with Characters such as !, &, or # are effective for some engines, but others frown on the practice and do not acknowledge them.

With that in mind we are still left with the question of the moment, how to get our fun world of Xylophones to the top of those lists. First, search your musical brain for anything that would allow you to move your site title higher up in the alphabet.

Using a straight reference to musical notes, we could change the title of the pages to: "A-Sharp's Music House Of Xylophones".

Once we have our new site title, we need to develop a string of keywords to follow our new title, which will help us score well within the engines. One of the key elements to receiving high placement is having keywords early on in your HTML, and our good friend, "Captain Obvious", can tell us that, before anything else, comes the title.

By putting keywords, such as music, instrument, band, rock-and-roll, and musical, into the string of keywords, you can achieve a couple things. First, you've gotten rid of the silly phrase "Oh Lordy We've Got Xylophones", and you can replace it with the phrase, "Musical Instruments For Rock-And-Roll Xylophone Bands". So when you put it all together you have a site title of: A-Sharp's Music House of Xylophones: Musical Instruments For Rock-And-Roll Xylophone Bands.

Another plus for this site title is, it's only 90 characters, which will fit into most engines. It is a good idea to keep your site title under 100 characters while using as many keywords as possible.

And, that's how to get your site listed higher in the search engines by using Keywords and a more focused site title.

Along with being the author of numerous articles on the subject of Internet Marketing, I've also written a book, titled "Internet Marketing Techniques That Your Competition DOES NOT Want You To Know."

I've been working online for nearly three years, and make my living helping others achieve success online.
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