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I write catalog copy for a living. If you have ever read that a desk chair offers
"all-day support with a contoured lumbar zone," there's a fair chance I wrote it, at a desk
in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for a company that makes office furniture. Writing words that help
people find things is supposed to be my job.
So it was humbling to put up a page about the covered bridges of Parke County, Indiana,
last February and discover that nobody could find it. Not one search engine knew it was there.
I typed "Parke County covered bridges" into AltaVista every night for a week and got pages and
pages of other people's bridges, none of them mine.
That was the start of seven months, nine search engines and three tries at Yahoo! The
whole story is in the diary, week by week. Below are the ten rules I
learned the slow way, so you can learn them the fast way.
One thing before you start: I don't work for any of these companies, and I don't know
how they work inside. Everything here is what happened to one small page, written down as it
happened. Your page may do better or worse. Mine did both, sometimes in the same week.
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The Ten Rules
| 1 |
The TITLE matters most.
The words between the TITLE tags are the blue link on every results list, and the name in
the bookmark when somebody saves your page. My first title was "Welcome!" Picture a results
list with forty pages called Welcome! on it. Put your subject first, in the words a person
would actually type. Mine now reads:
<TITLE>Parke County Covered Bridges:
A Saturday Driver's Guide</TITLE> |
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| 2 |
Write a META description.
One or two plain sentences that say what the page is. It goes in the HEAD, between
<HEAD> and </HEAD>, where visitors never see it. Several of the engines now show
mine under my title, word for word. Before I wrote one, AltaVista showed the first words on
my page instead, which were "Click here for the map."
<META NAME="description"
CONTENT="A Fort Wayne woman's guide
to the covered bridges of Parke
County, Indiana: back roads, the
October festival, where to eat."> |
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| 3 |
Write a short keywords list.
Same place, right under the description: the words people would really type, separated by
commas. Keep it short, and stick to what the page is really about. Put in the
misspelling you'd make yourself in a hurry. I have both "Parke" and "Park," because I spelled
it without the E for my first two years of visiting and so does half of Fort Wayne.
<META NAME="keywords"
CONTENT="covered bridges, Parke
County, Park County, Indiana,
Rockville, Covered Bridge Festival,
Bridgeton, Mansfield, Turkey Run,
Burr arch"> |
You can see all three tags at work in the top of my
bridge page. In Netscape, choose View, then Page Source; in
Internet Explorer, View, then Source. |
| 4 |
Submit by hand, one page at a time.
Each of the seven engines below has a link that says something like "Add URL" or "Submit a Site," usually in
small type at the bottom of its front page. Type in the full address of one page, fill in your
e-mail address if they ask, and click. Then do your next page. Start with the page you most
want found. It took me about two hours to do all seven, one Sunday night, and that included
a form that timed out and my modem hanging up on me once. |
| 5 |
Do all seven, and keep a log.
These are the seven I submitted to:
• AltaVista
• Excite
• Lycos
• HotBot |
• Infoseek (part of the GO Network now)
• Northern Light
• WebCrawler |
Write down the date you submitted to each. Then search
for yourself once a week, with the same words every time, and write that down too. It took
between three weeks and four and a half months for each of them to show my page. One of them
showed it, lost it for a week in August, and found it again. Without a log you'll never know
which is which, and you'll submit again in a panic. I nearly did, in August. |
| 6 |
Pick the right Yahoo! category.
Yahoo! isn't a search engine like the other seven. It's a directory, a big tree of categories,
and people put the pages in it. Before you suggest your site, click down from the front page
until you find the category where pages like yours are already listed. Then use the
Suggest a Site link at the bottom of that category's page. My first try, I put
my bridges in with architecture, because covered bridges are architecture, aren't they?
Nobody else's bridge page was there. That should have told me something. My bridge page
belonged under Indiana, then the counties, then Parke County, next to the other pages about
the county. |
| 7 |
Write your description the way Yahoo!'s listings read.
Read the listings already in your category. They're short and plain: what the site is, and
sometimes whose it is. No "best," no "ultimate," no exclamation points, no capital letters for
shouting. Here are my three tries. You can guess which one is listed.
| March 7 |
The BEST guide to Indiana's beautiful covered bridges!! Maps, festival info and MORE! |
| May 16 |
Your complete guide to Parke County's historic covered bridges, with insider driving tips and festival highlights. |
| July 11 |
Personal guide to the county's covered bridges, with driving notes and festival tips. |
The first sounds like a used car lot. The second sounds
like page 14 of a catalog, which is my fault; it's what I write all day. The third sounds like
the neighbors. I can't tell you whether the plain description is what did it, or the right
category, or just my turn coming up. I'd do all three again. |
| 8 |
Ask Jeeves does it his own way.
At Ask Jeeves you type a question in plain English, like "Where are the covered bridges in
Indiana?", and the butler comes back with questions he thinks you meant, each with an answer
link. I looked for a way to add my page and didn't find one, and as far as I can tell there's
very little you can do to hurry him. He found my page on his own in September. I don't know
how, and I've decided not to look a gift butler in the mouth. |
| 9 |
No tricks.
Don't type a word fifty times at the bottom of your page, and don't hide words in the same
color as your background. I came across a bridge page from another state with "covered bridges
covered bridges covered bridges" in white letters on a white background, a whole screen of it.
You find it the minute you drag your mouse across the bottom of the page and it lights up. It's
the Web page version of a salesman who stands too close. Visitors find hidden words too, and
they think less of you for them. That's reason enough for me. |
| 10 |
Ignore the junk mail.
In April the first one arrived: "WE WILL SUBMIT YOUR SITE TO 900 SEARCH ENGINES FOR ONLY
$39.95!!!" I've had eleven more since, from what I think are four different outfits. I can name
nine search engines that people actually use, and you can handle every one of them yourself, for
nothing: seven in an evening, Yahoo! with patience, and Ask Jeeves by waiting. Press Delete. It's the most satisfying key on the keyboard. |
How It Came Out
In February the bridge page had six visitors a week, and I was four of them. Last week
it had seventy-one. That isn't a lot by some people's standards, but nearly every one of them was
looking for covered bridges in Parke County, and that's exactly who I wrote it for. A retired
couple from Michigan wrote to say they planned their whole October trip around it. I printed
that letter and pinned it to the wall of my cubicle, right between the chair specifications.
The diary has the dates, the near misses and the search words that
brought people in, including the one that made me take my employer's name off my page.
Visitors to this page since February 20, 1999:
   
(The bridge page keeps its own count. It's well ahead.)
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Getting Found