Promotion World ARCHIVE Tutorial December 27, 1999 Developing Keywords To enable you to get a good listing on the search engines, you need to have a few things set up right. First of all, you need to decide what the main keywords for your site are. You should think up about ten that accurately reflect the content of your site. Try to be as specific as possible. For example, if you had a site about raising and selling beetles, you might decide on: raising, selling, feeding, beetles, fun, enjoyable, hobby, insects, bugs Additional Resources: Preparing Your Site In this tutorial, Susan Sweetin shows you how to prepare your site for the search engines. She runs through the basics of meta tags, keywords, and everything else you need to know to get started. Be Organized This article by James Graham has lots of good ideas to help you organize your promotion efforts better. You will also need to come up with a short description of what your page is about. It should just be a short paragraph, less than a thousand characters. To use my favorite example, if you had a site about raising and selling beetles, you might put something like: We teach you how to raise the best, most healthy beetles and how to sell them. Learn why you would want to raise and sell beetles! Beetle raising can be fun and enjoyable. Good question... why would you want to raise and sell beetles? A description like that would get me to visit the site. And that's a good thing, too, because this description is what everyone will see when they do a search for this site. You need to hook 'em with it. You also want to use your keywords as many times as you can in it. It helps you to get listed higher on the search engines. Notice how in the above example I managed to use the words "raise" and "beetles" and "sell" as many times as I could, without making it look like bad copy. In the next section we will learn how to put this all together and create Meta Tags.