Telling searchers about my site?

luckat

I've just made a basic site for a business I'm running, and need to know how to tell search engines about it. Sorry to ask what's obviously a very basic question, and probably a huge one. I don't want to spend huge amounts of time or money on this (have to make a living), but if people can help with simple methods I'd be grateful.

yeraulone

You can register your site with most search engines for free (google, altavista, yahoo) Most have an option somewhere on their homepage, with details on how to do it. Just have a good look through them.

luckat

Thanks, yera. I've found something called submitside and used a few of the options there; I'll now fish around on the individual sites too.

Here's my site, by the way: http://homepage.mac.com/lucred/Edit/Index.html

mneylon

Don't forget to manually submit it to all the Irish directories.

wheres me jumpa

what are the most important factors for getting a good ranking?

seo-ireland

- Build lots of links from related websites to your site with optimized anchor text e.g. if your site is about blue widgets have the text in the link to your site to say something like 'Information about Blue Widgets'. Try to vary the anchor slightly though as links with all the same anchor text will throw up red flags for the search engines that you are trying to manipulate rankings.

- Write descriptive unique title tags. A simple mistake made by many. The title tag is one of the most powerful weapons at your disposal. Include 2-3 keyphrases relevant to the content of your page and keep it below 65 characters.

- Make sure your site is easily spiderable by the search engine crawlers so that they can find each page on your site. Include a site map and make sure that are easy to follow i.e. Flash is a no-no for links and so are complex Javascript implementations that the crawlers cannot execute.

- Make good use of the heading tags on your pages. There should be only one H1 tag per page and this should reinforce the text contained in the title of your page. It is not uncommon to repeat the title tag text in the H1 tag. H1 tag is given the most weight by the search engines where as tag H2 through H6 are treated equally.

- If at all possible build your pages completely in CSS. This gives you clean, small pages that the search engine crawlers will eat up for breakfast. Using CSS gives you a lower HTML to content ratio which allows the crawlers to find your keyword fodder content easier.

- Write quality unique content making good use of headings and sections. Do not worry too much about keyword densities (as you may have read about on other sites). There is a new techique cropping up in the search engine world call LSI (Latent Semantic Indexing) which basically makes it possible for search engines to cluster certain words together to discover themes. As a quick example if your page contain the words 'Tiger Woods' and 'putter' then you may rank for the search phrase 'golf' even though your page does not not even mention the word 'golf'. In short when writing content try to include words that are relevant to the theme of the page. This helps to reinforce the theme of a page to a search engine, which they absolutely will love you for.

There are more of course.

Fionn

don't forget to submit to
http://dmoz.org/
(in the proper category)
lots of the other search engines use this to index sites

btw your site is throwing up a 404

mneylon

Both DMOZ and the local directories are indexed regularly by Google, so it is well worth submitting to them.
A listing in DMOZ can take some time to appear, whereas a listing in one of the Irish directories should only take a few days at most.

Serbian

Fionn wrote:

btw your site is throwing up a 404

It's because of the capital letters in the web address:

http://homepage.mac.com/lucred/edit/index.html

Serbian

luckat wrote:

I've just made a basic site for a business I'm running, and need to know how to tell search engines about it. Sorry to ask what's obviously a very basic question, and probably a huge one. I don't want to spend huge amounts of time or money on this (have to make a living), but if people can help with simple methods I'd be grateful.

Having taken a look at your site, I personally don't think it's worth promoting this site as it currently stands. There are a few reasons for this:

Firstly, your site is for a business yet the domain for the site looks more like something you would find on a personal homepage. It doesn't cost that much to purchase a domain and hosting - You can get a basic package with someone like Blacknight for under €100 a year. Unfortunately edit.ie is gone, but I'm sure there's a good domain out there for you.

Secondly, the site doesn't look professional. It's not even clear what the company name is. I know you are not a webdesigner but it might be worth getting a quote off someone (maybe someone here would be willing to help you out) to make a simple but clear and attractive site. There isn't that much to the site, so I don't think you will be breaking the bank. Appearance is so important. Think to yourself: "If I came to a site that looks like this, would I be inspired to give them a call?". The answer is an emphatic no I'm afraid.

Finally, you need some SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) done to the content. The advice from seo-ireland is something you should take seriously when looking at the content and structure of your site. As far as I am aware, a .com address will allow your site to have a greater ranking, or at least hosting the site on the root of the site, so getting your own domain might help that too.

Look around at competitors or related sites to get ideas about the standard of websites out there, and aim to beat them.

Anyway, I know this isn't what you are looking for, I'm not taking a go at you or anything, I just think if you are looking to gain business through your website, you are not going to do it as it stands.

Fionn

:eek: well spotted Serbian!

it just occured to me that the address must have been typed in rather than copied and pasted...that would explain the capitals

I would concur with everything that Serbian said, after loking at the site I didn't actually figure out the name of the company, what is it? maybe a telephone/fax number might be useful too. People here will advise on layout etc. if you ask.
perhaps if it's aimed at the local market a dot ie name might be an idea, it's a bit more spendy than a dot com tho!
As Serbian pointed out try and view the site from a visitors perspective or get someone to review it (i guess it's sorta being reviewed now) anyway hope you can regard it all as constructive!!

good luck with it.