How It Works

• How do you get listed?
• How can you update your listing?
• How will your site appear?
• And So, Metatags are Important!
• What does a meta tag look like?
• What can I include in a meta tag?
• We list any site in San Diego

With the Internet's most famous search engines, Yahoo, Lycos, Alta Vista, if you search for something in San Diego, you're likely to get sites with no connection to San Diego at all! We've remedied that. While the connection might not be immediately obvious, take another look. Maybe one of San Diego's many talented and well connected web development firms manages the domain for the site.

This region contributes more to the Internet than most people realize. San Diego residents control more domains than 27 other entire states. And, more than that, this region is a beehive of technology activity. The rest of the country is just beginning to figure that out. We intend to help speed up that process.

How do you get listed?
To get your site listed on sandiego.com, your site must be owned or administered in San Diego (and those facts must be verifiable independently) or the site must have a primary focus on San Diego or something in San Diego. To submit your site, go to http://www.sandiego.com/bb-start.asp and enter your complete site address. Our tools will attempt to determine, automatically, if your site qualifies for listing. If a determination can be made, your site will appear immediately. Otherwise, it will be submitted for review by our editors and you will get a notice about its status afterward.

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How can you update your listing?
The only way to change your listing, once you're approved, is to change you site and return to http://www.sandiego.com/bb-start.asp and enter it again. No passwords, no waiting for an editor to review your site. Give it to the beachBots and, if you qualify as a San Diego based site, see it in the searches immediately.

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How will your site appear?
Each site is listed with four basic pieces of information:

1. the default page TITLE;
2. the default page contents of the META tag for DESCRIPTION;
3. the contents for the META tag for KEYWORDS;
4. the date the page was last changed according to the server on which it resides. To be found, the most important of these is KEYWORDS.

Without keywords, your site will not appear in keyword searches, the most used search method. Leaving out the other tags will just make it look bad. We do not include the TITLE content or the DESCRIPTION content in keyword searches. We also do not store (for searching) the text which is displayed to the visitor to your site. This helps users locate sites more accurately. For example, if Alice's Shoe store has keywords "SHOES, FOOTWEAR, BOOTS" but a paragraph on the home page describing the owner's love for the beach, searches using BEACH will not bring up that site, but searches for a shoe store will. Our goal is to make the searches of our users as efficient as possible - beginning with the fact that our user knows, up front, that every site we list has something to do with San Diego.

Since the content of the KEYWORDS tag have a significant influence on how you appear in other search engines, changes you make to be ranked higher in our engine might adversely affect your listing elsewhere. The key is to choose the most optimum combination - the closest fit to your real mission - and use those. In that case, you will appear at the times your targeted user searches for you.

Lastly, we record the date the beachBots last examined your site as well as the date your home page was last modified according to the server hosting your site. This will help users find sites that are frequently and most recently updated by ranking them higher on the list than sites with stale information.

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And So, Metatags are Important!
Our search engine utilizes an optimized proprietary software known as "beachBots" to collect information about your web site and store it to our database. When you or anyone else, enters your URL (Uniform Resource Locator...you know, the thing you type in) to our system, the beachBots visit your site to gather information about your site. If you add the KEYWORDS and DESCRIPTION meta tags to your home page to be visible on our engine, your site will become more visible on the whole Internet. If we all do it right, web sites in San Diego will be found more often by users around that world...and that's good!

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What does a meta tag look like?
Meta tags go into the top, invisible to the user, part of your document, just after the <TITLE> element. It follows the usual form of an HTML tag that holds the rest of your content, ie:

<META name="thisisyourtag" content="something else">
but note that you don't need to have a</META> at the end of the tag.

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What can I include in a meta tag?
There are four major meta tags you should use:

1. <META name="keywords" content="san diego, list, of, keywords">
   Choose whatever keywords you think are appropriate, separated by commas.
2. <META name="description" content="a description of your page">
   Depending on the search engine, this will be displayed along with the title of your page in an index. "content" could be a word, sentence or even paragraph to describe your page. Keep this reasonably short, concise and to the point.

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We list any site in San Diego
To maintain our credibility for listing every site involved with San Diego, we do not exclude any site or any kind of content on sandiego.com. However, we do take steps to make our service child-friendly using our ParentCheck service. We developed a special system for determining the likelihood that a site will contain content offensive to some people in regard to pornography. (We do not attempt to do any special handling for sites with bad writing that might offend high school english teachers or sites with bad ideas that might offend the politically oriented.) Each site is checked and sites that qualify as safe to present appear directly on the search results page. The rest are still available, but the user must press a button indicating they are 18 years of age or older and then we display the rest of the sites. These pages will contain a different RSAC rating with higher settings for Language, Violence, Nudity and Sex. We do not attempt to measure the degree to which each site should be rated, so we use the most severe of each category in the RSAC rating scheme:

• (n4) frontal nudity that qualifies as a provocative display of nudity
• (s4) sex crimes
• (l4) crude, vulgar language
• (v4) wanton, gratuitous violence

As a webmaster, you should refer to http://www.icra.org to rate your site and place the rating tags in your pages. Many browsers are set by conscientious parents to avoid display of some sites to their children. We intend to honor the parent's right and obligation to their children without restricting content providers from making their sites available. To read more about our ParentCheck service as a parent or as a webmaster, go to http://www.parentcheck.com/.

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