The alternative to a site where you describe your new Web page and how it should be organized and categorized are those sites where you provide your URL and their programs visit your page and read through your meta description and keyword information. (You didn’t forget to include those, as detailed earlier in this chapter, right?) They then add your pages, oneby- one, to their massive databases. As you learned earlier in this chapter, the programs that actually index the Web pages are called robots. There isn’t much difference between the various robots. In fact, you don’t really even need to register with these sites. If another page on the Web points to you, they’ll eventually find the link and make it to your Web pages. Of course, it is worth visiting them because giving them your URL speeds up their finding and indexing your page. I suggested earlier that you craft your pages to ensure that keywords and concepts appear in the first few sentences. Don’t fall for the trick of setting your text to the caution same color as the background by thinking you can have search engine content that visitors won’t see. Code like the following probably won’t slip by the search engines: <h1 style=’font-size:5%;color:white’>list,of,various,key,words[/B] The smartest of the search engines—notably Google—can catch this sort of trick and penalize you or perhaps not list your site at all. It’s not worth the risk! In fact, the search engine sites are pretty darn smart. Any tricks you think will work probably won’t. Just create good, informative pages with content, and you’ll have the best results.
