by Douglas Gross

Created on: August 21, 2008   Last Updated: August 23, 2008

I have studied SEO (search engine optimization) on my own, and have learned a few things. It is all about key words and phrases, and key phrases are about the most common word associations used in a search. Google's tool for finding key words and phrases is located at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExterna l#, and the language used can be changed if necessary. You can download a .csv (comma separated values) file or a text file of the key words and phrases you choose to add to the file.

It is not just about putting the key words and phrases in your meta tags. Search engines also like to see them in the textual content of the site itself, of course, and they should be used in the title tags where they match page content. The search engines use confidential, complex algorithms to determine the relevancy of a site and its individual pages to the overall search. What you put in the title tags is displayed along with the text that contains the key words and phrases that were entered into the search. So, the title tags are indeed important.

Search engine submissions are great for speeding up the process of getting a site crawled by search bots and broadening the number of engines that have the site and its pages indexed, but submitting repeatedly could offend the search engine and get the site blacklisted. Advertising a site should only be done if it is a commercial site with products or services. If the poetry site is just for displaying poetry, the site owner and web designer/developer should rely on the relevancy of the content of the site to the search to bring traffic.

There are a lot of poetry sites out there, so it is not always enough to allow someone to simply visit and bookmark the site. The site should be updated periodically, and a good way to keep visitors interested is to have a newsletter. You have to be a pretty good programmer to create your own mailing list, so chances are when you are starting out you will have to use someone else's web application for your mailing list. There is a really good mailing list application available at http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/elist/ for free. There are many other helpful tools available on http://www.bravenet.com.

Despite what you may have heard about meta tags, they are still useful, particularly when you want to tell search engines how often to revisit and when you want to specify a geographical location. For instance, if you add a page for an upcoming poetry reading, you would want to do a search

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