Search Engine Rules of the Road

Now that you have a basic understanding of how to get your MLM website up and running online, the next big question is how to deal with the "highway authority" the search engines.

It's not difficult to get listed in the index of a search engine or a directory, the hard part is getting a decent ranking position in the first ten pages because when most people do a search for something they usually will not go further than this. Being in the first three pages is best.

It's easier to get on the bad side of the search engines and be excluded from their index than most people realize, so here are the basic "dos and donts" to help you steer clear of trouble:

• Do: Focus your website information on the keywords that relate to your MLM service and product
  Don't: Use the same keywords 20 times on one page


• Do: Pay close attention to your MLM web page TITLE tag, the description, revisit and robots Meta tags. The first thing a spider looks for when it hits your website is a "robots.txt" file, to know which web pages you want indexed and those the spider should ignore. Robot Manager Pro is an excellent tool for creating robots.txt files and well as monitoring spider traffic. Download a free copy at http://www.websitemanagementtools.com/robot.html. The "Revisit" Meta tag instructs the search engine spider to return in so many days to re-index the site.
  Don't: Use every Meta Tag available.


• Do: Test your page to make sure it has no errors.
  Don't: Use outdated website design techniques.


• Do: Submit your website to the search engines when it first launches.
  Don't: Submit your website every month.


• Do: Use ALT tags and TITLE tags on your images and compress them to reduce their size.
  Don't: Use images as a replacement for text content.


• Do: Create a privacy statement and sitemap for your website.
  Don't: Use "doorway" pages.


• Do: Update your content regularly.
  Don't: Publish content that is unrelated to your service or product.


• Do: Contact other webmasters with authority sites connected to your website content for inbound links
  Don't: Create outbound or inbound links to websites that have no relationship to your product or service.


• Do: Have at least 350 words of content on your webpages
  Don't: Make your webpages longer than 3 monitor screens deep.