Score a top ten ranking on AltaVista or Excite, or any of the major search engines, and you're going to get some good traffic to your site. The trick is to get these indices to list your site, and to induce them to rank your site's relevance higher than that of other competing sites. Score among the top ten in several of them, and you're a hero-that Web site's going to pay off, big time. What to do Search engines use proprietary software algorithms that read a Web site's content and invisible meta tags, and then index what they find in massive relational databases. Relevance of a site is ranked based upon several factors, most of which have to do with the frequency and location of the specific keywords that were searched on within the pages of the sites in the index.
Most search engines use automated Web browsing programs called spiders, bots or robots.
The trick is to build spider-friendly pages that will enhance the spider's ability to review the content of your site and judge its relevance as greater than that of other, competing sites. First off, we need to define what your audience is looking for. And as simple as that may sound, it's critical at the outset to put yourself in the shoes of the Web surfing public, and define the content and copy your audience is seeking. Then, we distill that information down into sets of keywords or keyword groups that we can reasonably expect your intended audience to use to search for relevant Web sites. If your site has several distinct areas of content, then we'll need several different sets of keywords.