There is a lot of great advice that comes through Promotion World in relation to search engine placement by some very qualified people.
And I would like to offer another angle to this. Let me set the stage first. I work on the assumption that for every one person that asks, suggests, complains or whatever there are one hundred more that are saying "yea, me too!"
While the impression is that most (if not all) are on-line trying to make a dollar, I believe this is only partially true.
And for those that are, in the words of Eddie Vedder, "...this is not for you".
And for those that would just "like to see their pages" list under your chosen keywords, this *is* for you.
My first instruction is: Have fun with it!
You have seen much information, maybe too much, in the past weeks and months in relation to developing pages for placement. Too much techy stuff just might get you tunnel vision and cause you to zig when ya wanted to zag.
Get a notepad...a yellow legal pad...made of paper, and write your page copy. Do it in the sun on your back porch, at the beach, in the restaurant....just where ever you may be.
Let the words flow in a focused, friendly, fun and unhurried manner. Do that first...the rest will take care of itself.
It can be a long up-hill journey towards having your site come up under your selected keywords...so take it easy.
Certainly there is enough pressure in a day to not have the added disappointment of your site not coming up under "John's big time home page party".
Be at ease and you will write at ease and when your pages are viewed they will reflect that, instead of disjointed, unfocused rhetoric like, "Man I just wish (home page party) that you could see all the (home page party) stuff that I have here at Home page party just for (home page party) YOU".
The parent company, Excite, powers these engines. So the technology is pretty much the same (if not *the* same) for each one.
And on a related note there is always a lot of talk about having to develop separate pages for separate engines, this is not always the case.
If you are aiming at "Internet marketing" or "website promotions", "travel" or any dirty words it will prove to be a challenge.
But for the average person looking to get, say, "dogs that deliver doughnuts in the night" listed or "grand bay alabama" then it can be very different for you.
As a matter fact, at one time I did have one page (thats 1) listed in most of the majors under "grand bay alabama". So it is not impossible.
Often I think we on the W.W.W tend to look through a very large lens when making up pages AND when talking about search engine visibility.
Thats our fault, because it looks to the new person, or uninitiated, that it is going to be one pain-in-the-you-know-what trying to get pages listed under some obscure keyword group when in fact it may be a breeze.
One thing that I would also like to mention to those that may be in a very troubling area like "internet promotions" or what have you, is to take every available caution to ensure that the page you are looking at the source code for is in fact the page indexed by the search engine.
Altavista and several others can run *months* behind when it comes to re-indexing or refreshing their data base. So the pages that pop up in the top positions may not be the page that the link will take you to.
And if that were not enough, there still are people that use all manner of tricks to make certain you can not get at the source code of the page you are trying to view.
This is due to (but not limited to) several of the the following:
CGI scripts that feed the search engine spiders one page but show you another.
Hot-swapping (I caught h-e double hockey sticks the last time I posted this) is when you submit a page to a search engine and then replace it with another after you know it is listed. We could call this MGI (manual gateway interface).
These are all important issues when trying to get placement in a specific area. If you are relying on a page and it has been modified to NOT get position (hot-swapped or CGI) then you are spinning your wheels...because you will NOT get position either.
In review:
Have fun, be fun, make fun....and try not to take this all to serious. Bill Gates is about to own all the world anyway and when he does all that will be on-line will be microsoft.com and webtv.net.
Alright thats just a joke.com.