[Fmpro] Search Engines (was; A near death experience)

[Les Mizzell]

> And in one last nod to Les, I'd like to share with you all, a 
> simple trick for getting your web site to the top of the dirty, 
> payola ridden search engines.  It's called the META TAG.  

Since the music biz isn't doing too good where I am, I've had to move on 
to other things for income between music jobs - so, I've been doing 
website design for quite awhile now.

At this point in time, Google virtually ignores meta tags when indexing 
sites. But, keep the following stuff in mind:

1. Your meta tags for each page *must* match the content of that page. 
If not, it will appear that you're attempting to use keyword spamming 
techniques and you have "points" taken off.

2. The "Title" attribute for each page needs at match the content for 
each page.

3. Use descriptive "Title" tags for links and "alt" tags for images on 
each page. Once again, needs to match content.

4. For Google, almost *nothing* is more important than incoming links to 
your site. These need to be *quality* links from other sites with 
related content. Having your site listed on a "link farm" somewhere is 
going to hurt your ranking.

In short, if you're using clean CSS layouts, meet accessibility 
requirements, and your code validates, you're on the way there. You 
still have to promote the heck out of your site, and get other 
sites/blogs to link to yours before you'll see any real increase in your 
SE positions.