It seems getting high ratings on any search word is as much an art as a
science. Most of the search engines will not even say how they index. Most
of what I have read on the subject comes out of peoples trial and error
experiences. Several of the web developer sites also design pages with
different strategies and then see how the rankings come out.

I suspect the search engine people do not want you to know what criteria
they are using because:
1. A spammer  will use the information to force their page into higher
ratings when it does not really deserve it. (Note: I know "spammer"
generally refers to email, I just do not know if there is an equivalent word
for web pages.)
2. If it works well, other search engines would start using the same
technology if they know what it is.

One of the best ways I have yet found to handle the alternate spelling
problem is to create a second "duplicate" page except with the different
spelling. Internal to you site, only link into the page with the "preferred"
spelling. But you submit both to the search engines and both are included on
your search engine link index page.

The duplicated page with the less-preferred spelling might have links the
same as the other page. So as soon as someone clicked they would be into the
preferred spelling pages. Or it's links could go into other less-preferred
spelling pages. I do the first one because it is easier to maintain.

This option is really fairly simple to do. Design and keep the page with
your preferred spelling. Then do a mass change to the alternate spelling and
keep under a different name. Add both pages to your search engine index
spider page. Submit both url's plus your search engine spider index page to
the major search engines.

Of course none of this works with "directories" such as Yahoo. These
generally only want you to submit your site and will consider multiple page
submissions from the same site as "spam". It works with the true indexing
search engines such as Google though.

Of course you can do the simple thing of just adding the alternate spelling
to your keywords. Some of the search engines will pick it up. Chances are
Google will not. Only time I have ever seen Google index on a word that only
exists in the meta tag keywords is when there are no other (or at least very
few) sites with that word on any page.

Another alternative you can try is to use the alternate spelling in things
like image description "alt" tags. I do this sometimes, but is a bit harder
to maintain. Or you could switch between spellings or use slashes between
spellings. But in my opinion this makes the page look cumbersome and clumsy.

You can thank the jerks who misuse the system for spam or fraudulent pages
for the current state of this mess. No matter what you do to get high index
rankings, some search engine somewhere sometime will probably decide you are
doing it fraudulently promote a page as something it is not. Then they will
downgrade the page and you are back to were you started.

Timothy Atwood
Holtenwood Computing
for Domtar Vancouver Mill
http://www.holtenwood.bc.ca/computing/

-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Thursday, June 21, 2001 12:05 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Cc: [log in to unmask]
Subject: RE: Is the e not catching on?


X-no-Archive:yes
This thread began with Gavin Scott observing the relative frequency of
search keywords used at the Google search engine, and comparing the relative
frequencies of the terms MPE, MPE/iX, HP-e3000, HPe3000, HP-3000, and
HP3000. Tim's post leads me to the question, how then do we make sure that
our sites show up, whether we call it the 3000 or the e3000? Those of us who
have web sites probably want to follow your advice on both keywords and
content, for the content to show up well in search engines. I'm still not
sure how to handle the 3000 / e3000 problem, as it relates to keywords
versus content.

Also, it seems that hp could include some more keywords, although it would
help if these are also  part of the page.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com
================================
The whole is more than the sum of its parts.
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