We have received many emails from our users and clients asking what is the best strategy for launching a successful website. We realize that the quantity of information we provide in our guides can be overwhelming and as such we created this section which illustrates the top recommended strategies that we not only talk about, but those that we use ourselves.

META Tags are by far the first and most important element that we would recommend to any website. Specifically, we suggest that websites at the very least use the Keywords and Description META tag. These META tags describe to search engines what your content is about and offer the most flexibility to webmasters. Additional META Tags we suggest are the Abstract and Revisit META tags. The Abstract META tag offers an abstraction or a brief overview of the content on your website. The Revisit META tag is suggested for websites who offer content that changes often. For example, all the webpages on Submit Corner have the Revisit META tag set to 30 days, such that every month search engines will revisit our pages and index any new additions we have added.
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Throughout our experience with search engines and their underlying technologies, we've noted several strategies which can help a website's search rankings. This section only covers a few of the tips we cover in our Site Improvement Guide.

Title Optimization: In addition to META tags, search engines place great weight on the words found inside your title. For example, if a user performs a search on a keyword and that keyword is found in your META tags and in your title, chances are your website will rank higher than a site who only has that keyword in their META tags.

Use ALT Image Tags: The ALT image tag represents a text version of what a graphic is meant to represent. Those search engines which index your entire page (ie: Altavista, Google) cannot read your graphics, so using keywords to represent what your graphic represents is an essential advantage.
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Once you've launched your website, it is important to assess your rankings in search engines. As we cover in greater detail in our Web Assessment Guide, many search engines have the ability to query specifically if your site is indexed, which pages are indexed, which sites link to yours (and how many) and who are your competitors. All this information is very powerful knowledge to assess your performance. To fast track learning over the special triggers that search engines use, jump directly to our Web Assessment Tools which will automate the queries directly for you.
Fast Track with our Web Assessment Tools

Externalize Your Javascripts: Javascripts are typically located at the top of web pages. However, they also tend to confuse search engines, especially those search engines which index your entire page. For this reason, any non-essential javascripts that do not need to be located at the top of your page, move them to the bottom.

Submit to Yahoo! Early: As soon as your webpages are ready to hit the search engines, start with Yahoo. Yahoo typically takes 8-10 weeks to get indexed. Yahoo! is probably the most difficult search engine to get listed in as they only index sites in which their editors feel are worthy of the category you're applying to. If you're experiencing difficulties getting listed into Yahoo, read these tips we wrote on the Yahoo submission process and our review of Yahoo!.