Search Engines

The web is accessed largely through search engines. Whenever anyone wants to find some information or a site but does not know which specific site to go to, they go to a search engine and search using keywords. Therefore, it is important that your site comes up in the first few results when someone searches for something relevant to what your site is about. For a site to show up in search results, it is necessary to submit your page to these search engines.

Some search engines honor META tags (described below) and some do not. Some of the most commonly used search engines are:
Yahoo: Yahoo does not honor META tags. It catalogs sites based on information submitted and Yahoo staff reviews. There can be costs involved for commercial websites.
AltaVista: Searches META tags and site text for keywords.
Lycos: Searches META tags and follows links on the submitted pages only.
WebCrawler/Excite
: Searches META tags and site text. Additional charge for guaranteed review.
HotBot
InfoSeek

The following are a few suggestions for submitting to search engines:

• Initially submit home page and other content heavy pages to at least the top 6 search engines.
• Search each engine for web page title after 2 weeks to see if it has been accepted. Resubmit page(s) if not found.
• Once the site has been accepted, check the search ranking using popular search string. Alter META tags and site content if ranking is not high enough and resubmit to search engine using search engine change form, where available.
• Check search engine ranking no more than every 3 months. Resubmit pages as necessary.

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META Tags

Probably the most important part of a webpage is the META tags. META tags are tags that go into the header section of the page. Their main purpose can be said to describe the essential aspects of the page. They are also used to do functions such as redirect to another page. A META tag is of the form:
<meta name="one of the names in the table below" content="as described in the table below">
The 'name' part of the tag is the name which is described in the 'content' part. The following is a table of what the META tag can be used for:

META tag
name-content	name=	content=
	keywords	This field contains keywords that contain the gist of your page. Search engines very often use the keywords here to enter into their database so that when someone searches for the same keywords, the webpage shows in the search results. For example, the keywords field for this page contains: madison, madisonindiana, madisonindiana.org, madison in, Madison IN, madison indiana, jefferson county, jefferson, jefferson co, jefferson county indiana, Jefferson County, ohio, ohio river, southeast IN, historic madison, website tips
	description	This field contains a brief description of the page, often displayed as a summary of website content below the website address in a search engine query result list.
	author	This field contains the name(s) of the author(s) of the page.
	generator	This field contains the name of the program that generated the page.
	copyright	This field contains information about the copyright. It is in the form content="© year holder". The '©' is the copyright sign ©. The year is the year of the copyright, and the holder is the name of the copyright holder.
	robots	Robots are small programs that are employed by search engines to browse the web and find pages for the search engines to index. This field, when set to 'NOINDEX' keeps the robots from indexing the page in the search engine. When set to 'NOFOLLOW' it keeps the robot from following links on the page to other pages to index in the search engine.

For more information on designing web pages, there are many HTML / web tutorials on the web. Check your favorite search engine using keywords such as "HTML tutorial".

Please refer to our resource sites page for links to sites where you may be able to list your business or organization webpage.

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