From this information, you can see that it would help to:

• Put your links at the bottom of the page, or place them deeper down in the document by some means.
• Repeat huge heading titles 3 or more times for each paragraph (like message boards do).
• Use lots of wordy descriptions for the alt tags on your images.
• Don't bother to "Welcome" anybody to your page.
• Don't use your company name (unless its "Coca Cola") in your titles,
• Get your page linked to from every free for all links (FFAL) page you can find,
• Repeat your keywords as often as possible in the text
• Change the nameofyourwebsite.com to the name-of-your-website.com
• Change the file-names.htm of all the documents to something more descriptive.

If all this sounds rather silly, and would make your pages look entirely wrong, join the club!

Keyword Weighting

There are many of these 'bot-sense' abnormalities that require you to find some sort of a solution or work around in order to please both masters! Depending on the name of your business or website, it's not too likely people will search for that word, however, when a human bookmarks that page, they would most certainly appreciate the page's title to be your site name!

Forcing the keywords to be repeated high in the document, is nonsense. Few good writers would repeat themselves so often in an opening paragraph! Click through responses, like that practiced by DirectHit, merely reward those with nice titles and description summaries that entice people to click them. This has nothing to to with whether they found something useful or had to come back to the search page again or not! These cheap tricks are entirely counter productive, to say the very least.

No discussion of search engines should go on without reporting that sadly, some of the major search engines give listing preference to websites that pay them for placement ahead of other sites, no matter what the purpose, quality or content of the site! Obviously no amount of submit tinkering, or content expansion will override such deliberately deceptive and misleading arrangements. In a novel bit of nonsense, AltaVista now wastes large parts of their results pages, enticing you to "Bid on cancer drugs and thousands of other items at Ebay" and the like, for a few of their other pet advertisers!

Another nuisance, are 'spam engines' (GoTo) which are owned by companies that have their own website axes to grind, and/or only accept paid listings sold to the highest keyword bidder, no matter the relevancy of the match! This is a very stupid and self destructive strategy as only a small percentage of searchers 'want to buy something' every time they seek information about it. This is really just a last ditch ploy to get some income before their inevitable .com bankruptcy!

The search engines, by using such nonsense strategies, are often merely corrupting their own results. Since a message board often shows the list of the 'discussion thread' title three or more times before the body of a message somebody has added, you will often get hundreds of "Email me a copy of that study and meet me at the corner bar after class" sorts of messages appearing before anything else while searching for something as simple as 'color psychology'!

Bear in mind that many of these sites are in fierce competition for 'portal' status themselves, have websites of their own, and they are unlikely to promote a competitor, no matter how excellent that content! This is especially the problem with human reviewed directories that are run by so called 'volunteers'. Major search engines have another problem with their huge 'legacy' indexes. Since most of those pages have already been added to their databases using this flawed 'top of the page' logic, they simply can't repair the damage it's caused, without starting over again.

Now, let's look at meta tags and how they are commonly used.

Continued... Read the rest of this first, or: