[Sue C]

Am I correct in that the search engines find you by what you have submitted in your <title> (I'm using Frontpage 2000) and then your <meta name> and/or by picking up actual words on your home page? If it's purely from the words on your home page, I am wondering about something. I just changed the heading on top of each page from using the text "Custom Motorcycle Paint and Airbrushing" to a logo jpg I made on www.cooltext.com. Will this affect how the search engines find me? I am ranking pretty well and don't want to lose my position.

I do still have the text "Custom paint jobs on motorcycles and helmets!" on the home page above the jpg images and there is text below the jpg images which incorporates these words, also.

Thanks,
Sue
www.kurtcarloni.com

[geo_alchemist]

if you have changed the text to a .jpg file, search engine robots will not recognize text on image. you can add same words as a keywords in meta tags (or somewhere else). as much as I know, effect will be the same.

Originally Posted by Sue C

Am I correct in that the search engines find you by what you have submitted in your <title> (I'm using Frontpage 2000) and then your <meta name> and/or by picking up actual words on your home page? If it's purely from the words on your home page, I am wondering about something. I just changed the heading on top of each page from using the text "Custom Motorcycle Paint and Airbrushing" to a logo jpg I made on www.cooltext.com. Will this affect how the search engines find me? I am ranking pretty well and don't want to lose my position.

I do still have the text "Custom paint jobs on motorcycles and helmets!" on the home page above the jpg images and there is text below the jpg images which incorporates these words, also.

Thanks,
Sue
www.kurtcarloni.com

[jaymanson]

Hi Sue,

Images are fine (what would the web be without them!!), but what can make a difference to the search engines is how you present them in the HTML. First, the image filename should reflect the content, so custom-motorcycle-paint-airbrushing.jpg would be ideal in this case. Secondly, in the HTML you should make sure the image has alt tags, so it should look something like:

<img src=http://yoursite.com/custom-motorcycle-paint-airbrushing.jpg” alt=“Custom Motorcycle Paint and Airbrushing”/>

Both of these will be picked up by search engines. Don’t cram the alt tags full of keywords, especially ones that don’t relate to the rest of your page as they could be detected as spam and your site may be blacklisted by the search engines. Also avoid any other techniques which involve hiding keywords on the page for the same reasons.

Also, if these are your main keywords, then you'd probably want the title to look like this as Google ranks this highly important and uses this as the main link to your site in search results:

<title>Business Name - Custom Motorcycle Paint and Airbrushing</title>

As far as the Meta tags go, make good use of the description tag as many search engines use this in the search results for your site, but don't worry about the keywords tag as most don't even look at it anymore! Do make sure your keywords feature prominently throughout your homepage, as doing this will help give your site the best possible chance of ranking highly when they are searched for. There's so much more to optimising your site for search engines than I can go into here, but this should get you started

[haswalt]

There are a few other things you can do:

make sure you have all the meta tags set for your site then you will be found easier.

Set the title to what you want the search engines to find, but then use javascript to change it to something else to show the user:

<script> <!--
document.title='my new title';
//--> </script>

Harry

[GCDude]

I would not use javascript to change the title of any pages so they appear differently to search engines compared to real people. This goes against google's guidelines.

http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769

As Jay indicated in the post above, something like
<title>Business Name - Custom Motorcycle Paint and Airbrushing</title>
would be ideal for users and search engines.