Getting found in search engines

[shlagish]

What if I want the search engines to find my site.
How do I make them find me, what is the best way.

I know about the meta tags, will that work?
Cause I heard someone saying that you had to do it for each search engine or something, what's that all about?

Thanks for any info

[MotherNatrsSon]

You should submit your site to searvh engines to be listed. It will take some awhile to get you losted even if you go to them , find their site submission page, and give them your site url etc..

MNS

[shlagish]

do I need to pay for this service?


Won't meta tags work?

<meta name="description"
content="This site is not good, don't come (I am serious)">

<meta name="keywords"
content="nothing, good, in, here">

[MotherNatrsSon]

They help to describe your site so they can "catagorize" your site. You can pay someone else to submit your site, but if you do it yourself it is free. My site(personal one) has only been online for about a week and I am listed on google when you serch for it. The only meta tag I have is the character encoding.

Example:

http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

Add your site to alta vista. the bot will follow all the links from your home page whether you tell it to or not as long as they are text links.

MNS

[ronaldb66]

The best way to get found by search engines and ranked appropriately is to have decent content... :rolleyes:
Other things will help, like keywords (don't make the mistake to include "hot" keywords that don't apply to your site; they've thought of that), getting linked to by influential sites, having the main subject of a page appear in the header, and in the body text near the top, and reappear a number of times, not forcefully, but by writing decent texts, etc.

Also, since search bots don't understand pictures but exclusively look at text, if your site meets high accessibility standards and shows up great in a text browser, you'll make the bots scan your pages more accurately as well.

Don't bother paying for submissions; just have patience. If your pages can be ranked accurately, they will show up in search results after a while.

[shlagish]

ok, I thought the search engines would go through every page they can find and analyse the keywords...
btw, I can't really wait for the bots to notice me... I'm announcing a concert, so if it finds me after the concert, it's too late...

[Nightfire]

You can pay to get noticed fast, such as yahoo's $500 or £500 fee to get added within a few days, which is completely pointless IMO, or just make sure you're listed in major search engines way before the event is meant to happen. Once you're listed, it could only take a matter of days to get your content refreshed

[shlagish]

So are you saying they can find me without me doing anything?

[Nightfire]

No, you'll need to submit to major search engines still, if you're lucky you'll be searched within a few days or weeks

[shlagish]

oh ok, thanks for the info guys/gals

[Roy Sinclair]

It's been mentioned before but stands repeating, to get a better rank in the search engines it helps to have a high "signal" to "noise" ratio. What that means is a page with a larger percentage of the total byes of the html file dedicated to textual content instead of html tags will rank higher than a page with the same content buried in a flurry of presentational tags. That's one of the major advantages of using CSS (and placing the CSS into an external file). with text that's been marked semantically. Doing that gives the page a higher "signal" value which helps the page's ranking.

[shlagish]

That's interesting. I don't think I would have problems with that thought

[tommys]

http://www.google.com/addurl.html


http://listings.looksmart.com/submit/

http://insite.lycos.com/


hope this helps

[liorean]

As for google, they have several important things they base your rank on a specific search on:
- The numbers of links to your site, their link text, and their pagerank
- The signal-to-noise ratio
- The higher/longer toward the left the search word can be found in the page, the better it'll be placed
- The outlinks to pages related to that search word (including the target's page rank)
- The number of occurences of the word on the page
- The number of occurences of the word in the site (including subpages/linked pages)

They are also said to have some kind of "context" detection, that makes a word placed in a situation with other words that often occur together with that specific word rank higher.

[raf]

Hope I’m not hijacking this thread, but does anyone knows how search-engines index a database driven site like this one? I sometimes find links to Coding Forums or other forums in my searchresults but I don’t quite understand how they can dig up those posts.

Do they systematically scan all new threads (based on the threadID) at certain intervals ?

[ronaldb66]

I guess search bots visit sites just like regular visitors; when they request pages for scanning based on links, they'll get the pages served up from the databases just like any other visitor would get.

[liorean]

Google according to my notes only records pages whose urls contain only a single or none url queries, however.

[bazz]

Does that mean that if someone types in keywords:

'accommodation timbuktoo'

... then the site www.timbuktoo-info.com won't show up as one of the results? :confused:

[liorean]

I don't know how smart Google is when it comes to redirects, but I guess in that case, it wouldn't appear. I really doubt Google allows verisign sitefinder to be listed for non-sitefinder-related stuff.

[zoobie]

Never submit your pages to search engines. :eek:
To learn about this and a few thousand other things, go read for a few months @ Search Engine World (http://www.webmasterworld.com/home.htm). :cool: