ALMOST FAMOUS Nah...this isn't about the movie although Kate Hudson is kinda foxy so posting a large colorful picture might be a good way to get people to read this. Actually, this is about Getting Famous. Your website that is. Datacorner's best tricks revealed here. Unfortunately there not really tricks....just some common sense and actual work.

First thing is the meta tags at the front of your page. Use to be they were the be-all and end-all to getting indexed (technical talk for showing up in a search engine). If you look at your web page source, the meta tags look like this:

<meta name="description" content="Almost Famous - Cast, Reviews, Fan Sites">

   <meta name="keywords" content="movies,films,movie database,stars,quotes">

which is an abbreviated version of the meta tags that head up the Almost Famous web site. Meta tags are a pretty good way to tell the search engines what your site is about. Except that everybody knows that so meta tags are the first place designer's try to game the system into putting them at the top of search lists. A good tool to check your existing tags or build new ones at siteOwner.com.

DON'T PAY FOR RANKING So what do you do? Next thing search engines seem to look for are links. Does your page link to other sites...and...this is the big one...do other pages links to your site? Can't overemphasize the value of this one. If other folks link to you, you must have value. This link business is what you pay for when you sink your money into those Improve Search Engine Ranking rackets. returns 1,580,000 hits on "improve search engine ranking". You can bet what percentage of those hits are folks trying to move a buck....from your wallet to theirs.

A better way GetFamous ...and it's free. Some web sites like onemission.com invite you to post your link. OneMission is pretty good. They organize their links, have reviewers and generally keep things clean. Problem is, users don't actually pore over the onemission stuff looking for your links. Better way GetFamous uses the forums. People actually read the forums. They look at the newest posts and actually read them...and then they even click on the links in the posts. What a concept.

RECIPROCAL LINKS Next problem, finding sites that do reciprocal links or wading through user forums to spot a good home. That takes a lot of time (that's the work part). How do you figure out the reciprocal link sites or forums of value. Wish I'd of bought stock in has just the tool, called appropriately the links tool. Type the word links: followed by the url of your candidate forum into the Google search box. Hit the search button and voila....the number of sites that link to the candidate you entered. A big number means its a popular site, low number forget it. I wouldn't bother with anybody that has less than a 10000 links. Datacorner got started with Started posting some of our source code there and those referrals alone are over a 1000 hits. But were still just getting started, go ahead, click on the icon and look us up. Yeah we suck, but give it time. Who said this was easy. On search ranking though we do pretty good. Why? read on.

CONTENT That brings us to the last and hardest problem, content. Why would Daniweb take us on. Why would anybody post your link. Well, ya gotta have some value. That's just how it is. Looked at this for a long time and what it came down to was that there had to be some real information on Datacorner that people might want to look at. Doesn't have to be words. A group of our folks went to New Zealand two years ago. Took a lot of pictures and posted them. Links to those picture went everywhere. Took them off the site last year. still thinks that the pictures are up. Great up to date work there folks.

RECENCY Which bring us to recency. Not quite sure that's a word...but let's use it to mean up to date. Clearly, Lycos has a problem Turns out Google is not quite the best either. How do we know? Web pages are served up by web servers like Apache from the folks at . Good thing about Apache is that it logs who comes to visit your site. Google hits Datacorner about once a week. MSN and Yahoo show up almost daily. Who has the most up to date catalog? You bet.