Search Engine Optimization! Big words. Big meaning. When Shop Montana designs a web site, we work with you to have proper meta tags and keywords to get your site found! Search Engine Submission is included in client hosting fees ($85 per Quarter) and is available at yearly fee for clients who choose to host their site somewhere else.

It's easy to get it wrong.

We know how to do it right!

Need more visitors to your site?

Here are some of the latest tips from the "experts" to consider:

Patience is a virtue
We understand how difficult it can be to sit and wait, but it can take many months before you achieve desired results. Remember that you are competing with hundreds of millions of other websites on the search engines, and patience will prevail! One of the worst things you can do is over-submit your website. Shop Montana will keep you from doing this. Remember that when you over-submit, you run the risk of being banned from search engines.

Website Content should be your #1 priority!
Shop Montana can help you in many ways, but your quest for high placement must start with a good website. It is important to have a lot of text describing what you do. Use your keywords in the content, but don't repeat them over and over. Many search engines rate sites based on 'keyword density'. This is usually a formula that looks at META Keywords, words in your TITLE, words in paragraph text, words in links to other pages, and even words in the 'ALT' text on your images. They will even look at different forms of your keywords. For example, if an important keyword for you is 'FISH', the word 'FISHING' in the body of your document will raise the confidence in the word 'FISH' on some engines.

Links to Other Pages
We can't emphasize enough the importance of links. Both from your page to other pages, and from other pages to yours.
First consider links on your pages. When many search engines see them, they consider your site more 'real'. It also gives the search engine spiders a place to go. Make your links meaningful. Make sure they relate to what you do (and keywords that are important to you). You can't have too many links on your pages.

Links from other websites
Some search engines place a very heavy rating of importance on how many other sites in their index have links to your website. Think of it for a second. If you knew that a company was only linked to by one website, versus a company that was linked to by a thousand websites, which one would you consider more important? If you were a search engine, you would surely try to link the more important ones first. This is where patience comes in again. It can take some time to get a ton of links to your website.

Don't use frames
Most search engine simply cannot index a frames page. They get to your site and can't go anywhere. Consider frames like a big 'GO AWAY' sign.

Don't try to fool the engines
This is probably the biggest trap people fall into. People come up with ways to 'fool' search engines, and they work for a little while... sometimes. But then the search engines catch on and write routines that penalize sites that use this practice. Examples of this include, but are not limited to: repeating keywords over and over; using invisible text (white text on white background); using very small text to jam the keywords in a small area.

Keep the most important content near the top of your pages.
Some engines will place a higher rating of importance based on where they find the text in your page. Closer to the top is usually better.

Don't stuff the top your pages with data the engines can't read.
As with the last example, something higher up in your page can be more important that something further down. Therefore, HTML formatting, images, scripts, etc. toward the top of your page can result in lower ratings.

Don't go Image Crazy
We have all seen pages that are almost all images. Usually they are the most beautiful sites. After all, your artist can make beautiful screens that display your content in the most eye-pleasing way. However, the search engines don't have eyes. They don't see the beautifully formatted text in your image. All they see is 'yourimage.jpg', and 'yourimage.jpg' doesn't go far in terms of content and relevancy.

Look at the competition
Consider everything you have read so far and have a look at the people that have the top 20 positions with the keywords that are important to you. Look at what they are doing and what they are not doing.

Happy Marketing..............