- Will they help you create meta tags for your web site?
- Will they register you with the search engines?
- What search engines do they submit to?
- Do they mass submit, or will they hand submit your site to the important search engines?
I read the above text in an article that was listing the “Top 10 Items” to look for in a web developer.
The article had no date, so in all fairness to the author it might have been written 5 years ago and been quite relevant at the time.
Here in 2005, if your web developer talks about creating meta tags, fire him. Immediately.
But we’ll get back to meta tags. The bigger issue this article made me see is how search engines are all at once highly misunderstood yet considered highly important by business owners.
I’ll get questions like “Joe from the regional office just called and said we don’t come up on Google for __________. Why is that? We sell that.” When I start probing around marketing plans, content plans, linking strategies, etc I often get blank or confused stares.
So I’m going to start a weekly series here on Boyink.com - Search Engine 101. First we’ll talk about how search engines work, why you may or may not have to submit, why meta tags are dead, why paying for “Search Engine Optimization” might actually hurt your rankings, etc.
Then we’ll jump to the business side and look at how see what search engines are feeding traffic to your site, and how to tell what phrases they use to get there. We’ll look at “pay for placement” programs and see if they make sense for your business.
Sound good?
Please - feel free to contact me with any search engine related (or other internet) questions you want answered.
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