Below is a copy of an article, which appeared in the May 1999 issue of Financial Planning Magazine.     This article mentions Terry Nelson, CFP^TM M.S. and hometownfp.com as a positive example of meta tags.  

Copyright 1999 Securities Data Publishing.  
A Division of Thomson Financial Services. All rights reserved.

Topping The Charts, by Ellen Joven

Being ranked high by a search engine increases your odds of being found on the Internet.

A recent search on "financial planner" using the Excite search engine yielded 15,960 hits. Holding steady at 32 was www.dollarsandcents.com, the Web site for Certified Financial Planner practitioner Shari Merle of El Dorado Hills, Calif.   A high ranking like Merle's can be desirable because it increases the odds of being found by potential clients. Merle does in fact field phone calls from people who have discovered her site while Web surfing.

So, how does one get so chummy with the search engines? Unfortunately, no sure-fire strategy exists to propel you to the top of the charts, but there are ways you can help boost your results rankings.

First, recognize that creating a site is only the first step in Internet-based marketing. "By developing a Web site, a lot of people think they automatically get into these search engines," says Scott Lindquist, director of Internet marketing at Carlsbad, Calif.-based Financial Profiles, a provider of financial planning software and sales tools. "That's not the case."

In fact, getting listed anywhere but at the bottom of a Web directory or search engine requires some commitment and labor, either yours or someone else's. A Web directory is compiled by actual human beings who visit Web sites and decide whether they merit inclusion; Yahoo! is the best-known example. A search engine-Lycos, AltaVista and Excite are popular examples-uses software, often called a spider or robot, to roam the Web looking at and cataloguing sites.

Because of its popularity, Yahoo! is a very desirable place to be listed. To get your site reviewed, go to the bottom of Yahoo!'s site (www.yahoo.com) and click the "Suggest a Site" link; there you will find an explanation of how to proceed.  One of the most crucial steps is to determine what category you would like your site to be listed under. Unfortunately, just because your site gets reviewed doesn't mean it will earn a coveted spot in the directory.

"The problem with Yahoo! is that they don't tell you if they reject you, and at one point it was taking six months for them to review sites," says Steve Gordonson, vice president of technology for AdvisorSites, a company in Jericho, N.Y., that develops Web sites for independent financial advisers.

The good news, Gordonson says, is that the time gap between site submission and review at Yahoo! has since shrunk. Those who don't make it the first time might want to keep resubmitting on a regular basis until they succeed.

For the impatient, Yahoo! is now offering a new service, Business Express, that allows would-be listees to pay $199 in exchange for a guaranteed review within seven days. That doesn't mean you will be accepted, though Gordonson says the acceptance rate is much higher for users of that service than for the ones who go the usual no-fee route.

The search engine robots are less discriminating than human-generated directories. Even if you don't bother to register, the robots will eventually find and list your site. However, without intervention you may end up at the bottom, which is pretty useless as far as promoting your firm is concerned. Also, the initial review could take time, from several days to several weeks.

To expedite the visit, you can go directly to the sites for the individual search engines that interest you and follow the instructions for site submission. (A listing of the biggest players is available at the Search Engine Watch site, at www.searchenginewatch.com.) Alternatively, there are sites such as www.submitit.com and www.registerit.com doing blanket submissions to multiple search engines and directories. The advantage: You fill out one form instead of many. The disadvantage: Such a service may not take into account all the idiosyncrasies of the individual search engines. Still, Gordonson says, the vast majority of people doing submissions rely on sites such as these.

Another source of help is software. Like the multi-engine submission services, software products can help automate the process of submitting and resubmitting your Web site information. One popular shareware product (try now, pay later if you like it) is SubmitWolf PRO, which among other things will track how your site is positioned with the major search engines. Information on this and other software products is available at the TUCOWS site (www.tucows.com). There, a cows-based rating system indicates quality, with five cows (yes, of the mooing and milking variety) being the best possible score.

Planners can fairly easily register their sites without outside help, but maintaining or improving the rankings may require more time and follow-up than they care to devote. That's because it's not enough simply to register once. The various search engines have different requirements. Plus, those requirements keep changing and other people will constantly be after your spot.

Even registration alone can be time-consuming. Lindquist says, "I tell reps, You're good at what you do. Go pay somebody $100 or $200, because they're going to do it a lot quicker, and they're going to do it right.'"

Besides, there is more than just the submission (and resubmission) process to consider. "Before you even begin to do your site submissions to these different search engines, you need to make sure your Web site itself is designed and tuned properly," cautions Abdul-Rashid Abdullah, who runs a Web design and hosting firm called MuntadaNet, in Honolulu.

A good tune-up might start with the site's title, which appears on the top horizontal bar of your browser. Many Web sites, Abdullah notes with some dismay, have as their title the words "Home Page."

"That's very bad," he says. "One of the few things that a search engine is looking for is the title of the page that it's spidering." The title will appear when your site is listed among search engine results. Abdullah therefore recommends selecting one that describes your company and that page.  Quite logically, the title appearing on his client David Drucker's site is "Sunset Financial Management," the name of Drucker's Albuquerque, N.M., firm.

Another robot-pleasing strategy is the use of meta tags, which remain buried in your pages' programming code and, while invisible to your clients, are detectable by robots. When robots arrive at your site, the meta tags can help some (though not all) of them give it a better ranking.

For instance, one type of meta tag is keywords, which give the search engines clues about your site's content. Take a look at the site for Roseville, Minn., CFP^TM practitioner Terry W. Nelson, CFP^TM M.S., at www.hometownfp.com, which ranked eighth in the search results for "financial planner" at Excite. If you right-click the page and then select "View Source," the underlying programming code will appear.

Nelson's keywords include "CFP," "fee," "financial," "advisor," "planner," "certified," "hometown" and "planning." He put together the site himself, but a planner can collaborate with a designer to ensure that relevant meta tag keywords are used for the site. Merle's Webmaster put in 62 words worth of them, including "employee benefit plans," "life insurance," "pension plans," "profit-sharing plan" and "IRA rollovers."

Some people try to cheat, inserting all kinds of irrelevant meta tags into their sites (such as "sex," a popular search goal on the Internet). But be honest or you may be found out.

"There are certain no-nos," cautions Gordonson, "and they change on a regular basis. For example, in the early days you used to be able to take one word and repeat it 1,000 times, for instance, in white text." Known as meta tag or keyword spamming, that trick will get you thrown out of today's savvier search engines.

"The bad thing," says Gordonson, "is those people who got into those engines three years ago are still there. They got the benefit of slipping under the wire."

Abdullah advises against home pages where the first page is nothing but graphics, because there won't be any text for the search engine spider to read.  Nor are home pages that begin with a frame set a good idea, he says. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have frames; just wait until you get further inside the site to some of the other pages, Abdullah says.

Even after your site is well-tuned and well-listed, you will have to keep busy just to maintain the status quo. "Change something on your home page on a regular basis and resubmit your site over and over and over again," advises Gordonson. Every month, for instance, Merle's Webmaster pesters her for a new article to post on the site.

Don't feel like being bothered? Merle doesn't. That's why she goes to an outside company, and you can do the same. "You can go hire a company that will take your site and continually rechurn it to try to push you up in the rankings," says Gordonson. Some of the services are expensive and can run $500 to $600 per year for monthly resubmission, Gordonson notes. Still, he adds, "It's not that expensive, if you think about marketing costs." In addition, less aggressive maintenance will naturally be less costly.

Ultimately, the expense of initial registration and minimal maintenance is low enough that, for planners who wouldn't mind a little unsolicited traffic on their site, there is little reason not to spring for at least those things. "My feeling is that, hey, you might as well," says Lindquist. "Going into a search engine is like getting a very inexpensive Yellow Pages listing."

And who knows what will happen next, he says. "There might be a million-dollar client out there, a doctor who's just too busy, who types something in on the Internet, and your Web site comes up."

-Ellen Joven

Copyright 1999 Securities Data Publishing. A Division of Thomson Financial Services. All rights reserved.