Finding Yourself in a Search Engine

Let me pass along an idea that just occurred to me - which I wish somebody had told me about some time ago. The problem is with submitting your pages to the Internet search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista. Some of the search engines are 6-8 weeks behind doing their indexing. Any webmaster wants to know if his pages have finally been indexed. You want to keep tabs on the places you can be found, so you can work on keeping your site findable.

My suggestion works best with automated spiders which process meta tags, but that's all but a few. Certainly you want to have a certain set of keywords the same in each page that you know you can search for. But so many things aren't unique--your name isn't good enough--trust me. OK, so put in a made-up "word", e.g. xyzzy, or just a string of numbers, e.g. 82994765123, that will work only for you. I expect the spiders will just take it all, and you'll have a key that will satisfy your need.

We get so involved trying to create keywords our users are most likely to use that we never think of the value of a "nonsense" keyword! I think it's a rather clever idea, if I do say so myself. Of course it's going to take another 8-weeks or more before I'll be able to test it. Enjoy.