How do I increase visibility on Search Engines?

[Guest]

Thanks to all the Front Page users who contributed ideas' etc. to me over the
past few weeks. I am the drummer in a Portland, Oregon based rock band &
rebuilt our site from "scratch" with MS Front Page. Anyone interested in the
Music Industry or just curious, please see the following site:
www.throwbackpdx.com

With the building process completed, I'm looking for ways to push our site
up or towards the front of search engine queries. Any suggestions would be
appreciated!

Thank You!

John
MS Front Page 2003

 

[Andrew Murray]

Most search engines will visit and index your site (this could take weeks or
months). The meta tags "keywords" and "description' are not so important,
although if you use these, then make sure the keywords you list are also in
the content of the pages, since search engines now adays index entire sites,
not just the keyword/description meta tags.

Also have some general advice about the site - that will also help with the
search engine listing.

1) Do away with the Word art - it doesn't work in browsers other than IE.
Search engines ignore it.

2) Your pages, I believe, contain way to much word art; this is definitely
not going to help your search engine ranking. Search engines index plain
text, not images or word art or other objects. Also Word art is VML which
displays well only in IE, other browsers may not render it at all or display
a bad GIF version of it - whereby you lose 95% of your site if it is not
displaying ina particular browser.

3) By all means, use images (but to minimal effect).

4) Also Blue and red text against black backgrounds is hard to read (eg.
where you have the "Rocking the Pacific North West" on the home page with
the 3D/dropshadow/neon light effect is very hard to read against black
background is almost invisible.

5) I have to scroll to the right to view the entire contents - and that's at
1024 x 768 resolution. You need to make your page fit the screen width.

6) Although you've stated you did this from scratch in Frontpage, it appears
to have actually been created in PUBLISHER or MS WORD (not in Frontpage as
it is (still) full of bloated code and VML objects which slows the page down
and may nor may not render correctly in other browsers besides IE.

 

[Guest]

Excellent Feedback Mr Murray, Thank You! From "scratch" meant I'm entirely
new using Front Page. Familiar w/MS Word & Power Point but have never used
Publisher. I did run the primary logo (shown on all pages) thru Power Point
for editing before attaching to site pages. Wierd yes but couldn't get the
results for transparency I wanted on Front Page alone. I don't remember using
Word for any editing, just PP on a few occasions.
Front Page definitely a good program, I'm just new to using it & looking for
ways to increase search engine hits.

Much appreciated!
John

 

[Pat Geary]

Thanks to all the Front Page users who contributed ideas' etc. to me over
the

past few weeks. I am the drummer in a Portland, Oregon based rock band &
rebuilt our site from "scratch" with MS Front Page. Anyone interested in
the
Music Industry or just curious, please see the following site:
www.throwbackpdx.com

============snip

I would suggest doing away with the splash entry page. See Google's
Guidlines for WebMasters.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Also
give each page a title that reflects the contents of that particular page -
not index or home or. Content for the page is important as well as the
structure of the page. Search engines don't read the graphics, they need
text. Add a consistent navigation system to each page. Just a couple of
thoughts.

pat

 

[Andrew Murray]

Your images should be created in an image editor....not in the Microsoft
Products like Powerpoint or Word. Paintshop Pro (pay-for) or Photoshop
Elements (pay-for), or any free image editor (search the net) should be good
enough for the task.

In any case, you can still use the text effects you created using Word Art.

You need to create the text, apply the word art effects, take screen capture
of the screen (PrintScr key) and paste that into an image editor (Ctrl-V)
such as MS Image Composer (came bundled with FP98) or other as mentioned
above.

Then crop it down to the size of just the word-art bit, and save / optimise
that image as a GIF or JPG. Then import that into your open web in
Frontpage, insert the image on the pages, and publish the page and the
images to the server.

I suggest you read up on Frontpage as you're new to it, starting here:
www.frontpagewiz.com .It's a good starting point tutorial.

Also if you're near a bookshop check it to see if they have "Frontapge 2003
Inside Out" - a member of this group is the author (Jim Buyens).

Else there's bound to be numerous other Frontpage books to choose from at
any good bookstore.