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Engines: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
A great looking site is
no guarantee that the search engines are
going to find your site, spider it, and
index it. As a matter of fact, some of the
best sites I've ever seen were so all "Engine
Unfriendly" that they never showed
up in specific searches at all. Search Engines
work by 'spidering' the Web and indexing
all the Web pages it finds under specific
heading or 'keywords'. When someone goes
to a Search Engine and enters specific 'keywords'
all the pages relevant to those 'keywords'
are listed in order of importance. The idea
is to ensure that your Web site comes out
near the top for critical keywords related
to your product or service.
How Quickly Can I get my Site
Indexed with the Search Engines?
Different engines act different. Many search
engines take a few days to a few weeks to
index your web sites to their database.
Most major search engines take more than
4 weeks even 6 weeks to index your web page.
Please give yourself enough time for the
engines to add your site to the database.
On the brighter side, I've had situations
when I have submitted a site for indexing,
and seen the Googlebot spider the site two
hours later.
First Step: Double Check Your Site
for Proper Links
Go over your site meticulously
just to make sure that there are no dead
links. Many web developement programs will
do this for you. Nothing ticks off a search
engine spider more than getting to a page
on a website, and having everyway off the
page turn out to be a dead link. One great
free tool that will test internal and external
links is Xenu's
Link Sleuth, the name being borrowed
from the great and terrible galactic rule
Xenu, of Scientology
fame.
Second Step: Have proper Metatags
and Keywords embedded in your pages
There is no real objective facts
about how important keywords and metatags
are with respect to getting decent search
engine placement. Some engines ignore metatags
altogether. One thing for certain is, they
can't hurt you if used properly. As a rule
of thumb, your keywords ought to be reflective
of the actual content of the page they are
embedded in. It's tough to trick the spiders.
For example, if you knew that a large portion
of guys out there are searching for nude
pictures of Pamela Anderson, and you wanted
to capture some of that traffic to go to
your antique furniture site, so you embedded
"nude Pamela Anderson" in your
keywords, the spider would check to see
if the content of your page was similar
to your keywords. Since there would be no
correspondence, the spider would rank your
site low for relevance.
The search engines work on a complex algorithym,
that utiizes both content, keywords, navigation,
and frequency of links from other relevant
sites in order to obtain ranking.
Third Step: Do all the Submitting
I hope you have some time on your hands,
and don't mind repetitively writing the
exact same 15 word synopsis of your site,
over and over again. I would begin with
the Open Directory
Project, then go to the home pages on
Google, Lycos, Altavista, Hotbot, and every
other search engine you can find. You can
pay for an indivdual to do it for you, or
buy software that will do it as an automated
process. (Caution- Some software that blasts
out submissions can hurt your ranking by
essentially "spamming" the engines...you
are far safer by actually manually doing
the submissions to the best engines).
For a fee, Lions Share Media can do all
of the page and site analysis and submitting.
If you are interested, simply email
us. Some submissions, such as the Looksmart
directory (Zeal), require all submissions
be done only by an individual who has passed
their exam. (Lions Share Media is qualified
and has passed the exam).
Content is King
The content of your web page is
the key to get your web site to be list
on the search engines. If your web site
is only designed to be "Good Looking"
and is heavy on the images, flash, javascript
etc, but there are no "valuable"
contents on the page, your web site will
be simply ignored by the search engines
because the search engines will index web
sites which contain the "valuable information"
not just "good looking" image.
Please put any real useful information
in text format to your web pages. When it
comes to getting indexed, err on the side
of information overload, rather than too
little text.
In Part 2 of
the "Increasing Web Traffic" story,
we will look at the 10 reasons why sites
don't get indexed.
And Part
3 will explain how reciprocol links to help
with your engine ranking.
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