This Site

[scarmouth]

To whom it may concern,

It's really interesting to read the how op2hacker and Leviathan and xfir went their own way regards this site.

However, it's not convenient for users to have to hit xfir's site before being able to come here.  In fact, I find myself googling to get to this site only to first find xfir's site and from there, click a link to this site.  Very unprofessional considering xfir's site ain't so pretty regards what happened between the three kings.  Before someone jumps in and says 'but scar, if you google for these phrases...' please realize that line of thought don't hold rare ore.

Anyway, I had a look at your home page source and noticed something missing that might just increase you hits.

You appear NOT to have a METADATA element describing the site through key words.
Web Crawlers use the metadata info to categorize sites and without it, WC's have to 'decide' how to classify site. Not good.

Here's the ebay metadata info:
<meta name="keywords" content="ebay, electronics, cars, clothing, apparel, collectibles, sporting goods, ebay, digital cameras, antiques, tickets, jewelry, online shopping, auction, online auction">

Typing any of those KEYWORDS into google will surely return a hit to EBAY

How about www.ford.com?
<META name="keywords" CONTENT="ford motor company Ford Motor Company FORD MOTOR COMPANY blue oval lincoln mercury mazda volvo jaguar aston martin land rover ford credit quality care motorcraft hertz vehicle ford cars automobiles trucks suv explorer sport utility">

Yup, you guessed right, search phrases in Ford's KEYWORD section will flavor your search results in their favor (not sure why they don't uses comma's though and imagine perhaps their not configured correctly) however if I were FORD, I would also slap all of the other car manufacturers in my METADATA so people searching the competition would also see my site too.  Just another reason Ford is now @ junk bond status.

xfir's site doesn't have metadata but I suppose the banner page is so small, google will scour the page for key words and I assume BIG sites, google will ignore, like yours.

Once you implant the proper metadata, you'll probably see a dramatic increase in your web trafic (I'm a consultant by trade and I understand companies pay BIG BUCKS for information like this so consider this pro bono:)

[Leviathan]

Thank you very much for the infomation, current I am the only web master of the site and I dont allways have much time, or spend much time on it, but soon Rock will be helping me out and I hope to get things like this added. Thankfully we use headers and footers, so I just have to add this in the header files

We have no control over xfir's site, and when you search for Outpost Universe Forums on google you get the url which the forums used to be at, with xfirs message. I may email him to ask him to put a auto redirect on that page.

[scarmouth]

Yes, easy to assume you have no control over XFIR's site.  However if you
add the METADATA information correctly, you won't need to bother with his
site anyway:)

Regards what you search for, who would search for "Outpost Universe Forums"
anyway?  But, no one outside of those who knew of the forum would type "Outpost
Universe Forums" to get here. It just doesn't apply to an install of game
right out of the box.    Sure, those who know about the forum to begin with but I searched for "OUTPOST 2" plus other stuff that eventually took me to XFIR.

Like I said in the original post 'but scar, if you google for these
phrases...' doesn't work since you have to anticipate what ALL Outpost
users might type.

Phrases like "Space, simulation, multiplayer, help, Outpost, Outpost 2,
Universe, Eden, Plymouth, cheat, cheats, forum, forums, online, on-line,
colony, game, gaming, gamer, Hamachi, download, strategy, faq, walkthru,
walk-thru" would be a good start as a METADATA list.


HTH!  

[cycletronic]

Just a note, Google isn't heavily influenced by Meta tags.  They use "page rank".  Page rank is increased by having other websites with high page rank link to your site.  The reason for this is to avoid crummy websites filling their page with keywords and making the internet useless.

So the best way to appear first in google?  Get a big website to link to you.

[leeor_net]

META tags are virtually useless for WC's with modern search engines. The only META tag that might be looked at is the "Description" tag which does nothing but allow the WC to not have to create its own description.

What WC's like Google do to rank web pages is look at the content, links and link refferalls. The more links there are to a particular page, the higher the ranking of that page is.

The content that's looked at is within the first 2 or three paragraphs. The bot looks through the paragraphs for the keywords. The more keywords are found in these paragraphs, the higher the ranking.

WC's also look at how frequently a website is updated. The more frequently a page is updated, the higher its ranking.

Relevant content is also a big facter that bots look for.

Most web crawlers will never look at the META tag "keywords" at all. The tag is totally ignored and may even help to reduce your websites overall rating.

Another thing most web crawlers will look at are the "ALT" tags for pictures. If an "ALT" tag has relevant keywords, the page gets more 'relevancy points'

Lastly, modern search engines will look at what is called "Click Popularity". The more times a page is clicked on, the higher its ranking goes. Of course, a single click is not going to make much of a change but if you have 1000 clicks, that will certainly make a difference.

Please note, however, that this website is far from SE optimized. As far as I can tell, Lev is very busy with a lot of things and because of that has been unable to make a lot of updates (again, Lev, I offer my assistance).

Also, this is a very simplified version of what actually happens with search engines. A full discussion would take several books. Of course, the way SE's rate pages is constantly changing and evolving so the information constantly changes and SEOed pages need to adapt to the changes to remain at a high rating.

I hope this clears some things up.

:op2: Leeor Dicker

P.S.
Adding 'invisible' text with nothing but keywords in the body of a web page will actually lower a pages rating, especially if a search engine actually discovers this type of 'cheat' (they'll remove the listing permanently!).

[scarmouth]

I stand corrected:(

However, I'd still do the METADATA although it does appear Google does factor it into the equasion.

[leeor_net]

Adding the "keywords" tag will not alter Google's search ratings. However, there are other META tags that will (such as "description"). It's all a matter of research and keeping on top of the SE's which is not an easy task.

A good place to start is SitePro News (I don't remember the link. You can Google it though!     ) It has a lot of really great articles and they consistantly update.

Oh BTW, another good tip. Weblogs, or blogs as they are more commonly known, will also help boost a web sites rating provided they contain relevant content to the site (note the "Developers Log" section on OP:MIA's website! )

:op2: Leeor Dicker