Publicising Your Web Site With Search Engines

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Publicising Your Web Site With Search Engines

• Marieke Napier
• Information Officer
• UKOLN
• University of Bath
• Bath, BA2 7AY

Email m.napier_at_ukoln.ac.uk URL http//www.ukoln.ac
.uk/
UKOLN is funded by Resource The Council for
Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint
Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the
Higher Education Funding Councils, as well as by
project funding from the JISC and the European
Union. UKOLN also receives support from the
University of Bath where it is based.
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Promoting your Web Site

• Talks at conferences
• Sites linking to you
• Promotion adverts/articles in the media
• Mailing lists
• Word of mouth
• Search engines

Your Web site
Search Engines
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What are Search Engines?

• A search engine is a program that searches
  documents for specified keywords and returns a
  list of the documents where the keywords were
  found.
• Webopedia.internet.com
• Search Engine or Directory?
• Spider, Index, Search Engine

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Web Site Design 1

• Keywords
• What are your keywords?
• How are they positioned?
• Lists of links
• Tables
• Frames
• Graphics
• Metatags

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Web Site Design 2

• Links
• Have an alternative to frames
• URLs
• Short and sweet
• avoid ?, , and other strange characters
• Bridging Pages
• Database delivery
• Robots.txt file

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Metatags
ltmeta name"keywords" contentcultivate, Web
magazine, cultural, digital, heritage"gt ltmeta
name"description" contentCultivate Interactive
is a .."gt ltmeta name"DC.Title"
content"Cultivate .."

• Dublin Core (DC)
• Resource Discovery Framework (RDF)
• Spamming
• Variations of Keywords
• Search Engines that dont support Metatags -
  Excite, Fast, Google, Lycos

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Indexing using Robots.txt

• Robot Exclusion Protocol (REP) - robots.txt
• ltMETAgt feature allows HTML authors to control
  robots

User-agent Following apply to all robots
Disallow /cgi-bin/ Don't index /cgi-bin
directory Disallow /resources/ Don't index
/resources directory
ltMETA NAME"robots" CONTENT"noindex, nofollow"gt
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Relevancy Ranking

• Location and frequency method
• Problems
• Popularity method
• Important pages?
• Reviewed sites
• Metatags
• Payment

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Submitting your Site

• Submit key pages
• Submit manually from Search Engine Web sites
• Use a submission application or Web service

Add a URLGoogle.com
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Which Search Engines?

• AltaVista lthttp//www.altavista.com/gt
• Excite lthttp//www.excite.com/gt
• Google lthttp//www.google.com/gt
• HotBot lthttp//www.hotbot.com/gt
• Lycos lthttp//www.lycos.com/gt
• Northern Light lthttp//www.northernlight.com/gt
• AOL, Ask Jeeves, Direct Hit, Go, RealNames, Web
  Crawler

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Measuring Your Success

• Checking your URL
• Search for Spiders
• Botwatch
• Statistics
• Referrer information
• Link popularity

http//www.cultivate-int.org/
hostcultivate-int.org/
urlcultivate-int.org/
domaincultivate-int.org/
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Problems

• Links, URLs, frames
• Bridging Pages
• Robots.txt file
• Database delivery
• Javascript
• HTML
• Free Web site Hosting

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Using Statistics

• Statistics packages
• Purchased Statistics Services
• Externally-Hosted Web Statistics
• Referrer logs

http//google.yahoo.com/bin/query?pWebpersonalis
ationhc0hs0
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Link Popularity

• Analyse how many sites link to you using a search
  engine

linkcultivate-int.org/ -urlcultivate-int.org/
LinkPopularity.com lets you check on the number
of sites linking to your Web site
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Resources

• For more a list of all URLs and resources
  referred to in this presentation have a look at
• lthttp//www.ukoln.ac.uk/isg/events/library-2000/se
  arch/gt