Internet Marketing Tycoon

**LizzeyDripping** · 10-29-2004, 09:53 AM

Hi!

I am working on promoting our company website, so was trawling through what other sites in the same industry were using for keywords etc. and I found this tag in one firm's site:

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="index, follow">

What does this mean? Is this something I could usefully add to my company's site?

Any feedback would be useful - I'm wondering if this is something that has helped with their rankings.

Thanks!

**Anacrusis** · 10-29-2004, 09:58 AM

It tells the search engine spiders to index the page, and follow any links that are on the page.

**LizzeyDripping** · 10-29-2004, 10:09 AM

So this would definitely be a good thing to add, I guess!

Thanks for the info!

**Anacrusis** · 10-29-2004, 10:13 AM

From my understanding, that's the default behaviour for the robots anyway.
That tag could be usefull if you wanted your page indexed but not any of the linked pages.

I could be wrong though

**LizzeyDripping** · 10-29-2004, 10:15 AM

Oh, OK - it's never easy is it?!

So I may not want to add this to my site? I'm a bit confused now. Can anyone shed any further light?

Thanks!

**Anacrusis** · 10-29-2004, 10:20 AM

Sorry if I confused you,
The bottom line... it does not hurt to have that tag in your page. So you can leave it in.

**LizzeyDripping** · 10-29-2004, 10:36 AM

OK, I'll leave it in. I have also noticed that some of these other sites have what appear to be keyword below the <HTML> tag but before the <head> tag. Why would that be, does it have a name and do you have any views about whether it is useful or not?

Our ranking on Google has gone up to 3, and despite the fact that I know this is very average, I am very excited that we are now no longer 0! But a search for our site using virtually anything other than the name of the company yields nothing (I gave up looking after trawling through 3 pages, as i expect most other people would have found what they wanted by then anyway!)

But I am looking for reasons why the industry leaders do so well - is it really ALL about back links?

Thanks for your help on this so far by the way!

**wfpeyton** · 11-21-2004, 05:02 PM

No, it is not all about links, but that is a great portion of it. It also depends on the title of the page, keywords, content and even your competition. It is all about 'Relevance'. If the SE considers your page title relevant to its content, and the text in inbound links also relevant to the target page title and content, it gives it a higher rating. That moves your site up higher in the search results. Make sense?

You should choose keywords that are not only relevant to your page content (make each set of keywords unique to each of your pages) but choose keywords that are specific to your subject matter. For example, if your site sells hand bags, don't use the single word 'handbags'. It gets a lot of searches, but you will be lost among a million other sites using it. Try to use keyword / phrases that are specific like: Oversize handbags, children's handbags, embroidered handbags and so on.

Hope that helps a little. It is a complex subject and requires a lot of work to make an impact.