showing up in a search engine

dal · 22 Nov 2005 at 21:13

I'm trying to make my website show up in search engines, now I've included the following code in my index page :

<head>
<title>Lisa's childcare</title>
<meta name="description" content="Lisa's childcare _ affordable childcare in Sutton In Ashfield Nottinghamshire, full details of prices, hours of available childcare & photos" />
<meta name="keywords" content="childcare, children, sutton in ashfield, child, UZZZZEE9, YYYYY" />
</head>

The strange keywords at the end are so I can do a search and not have 9 billion results : thus to see if it works.
Now basically I've uploaded the index page ( as well as all the other pages) with the above code inside it but do I need to do anything else ?
I see a section in my FTP program that says submit URL's to search engines but I was under the impression that search engines will index keywords from with in the META tags, or have I got this completely wrong.

LeperousDust · 22 Nov 2005 at 22:24

Meta data i think is often (always?) ignored by most major search engines. Google reads through your web page, including all the links and so fourth and gives it a rank from that, its "pidgeon rank" system, its somewhere on its website, but i'm not sure it covers how it works.

The more people that link to your website with the work "Childcare" or whatever as the link the more "points" your website gains

.

Good clean code, ie XHTML and CSS is also needed cause that has weighting too, i know for pretty much a fact your website isnt that, i think it had frames did it not? Hope this helps anyways, obviously if you need any help recoding your website nicey were all here for you

.

//Edit:
I did find you

Although it seems you've got major competition with your URL for starters!

iCraig · 22 Nov 2005 at 22:50

LeperousDust said:
Meta data i think is often (always?) ignored by most major search engines. Google reads through your web page, including all the links and so fourth and gives it a rank from that, its "pidgeon rank" system, its somewhere on its website, but i'm not sure it covers how it works.

The more people that link to your website with the work "Childcare" or whatever as the link the more "points" your website gains .

Good clean code, ie XHTML and CSS is also needed cause that has weighting too, i know for pretty much a fact your website isnt that, i think it had frames did it not? Hope this helps anyways, obviously if you need any help recoding your website nicey were all here for you .

//Edit:
I did find you

Although it seems you've got major competition with your URL for starters!

She should have a game of Google bowling with her competitor then

dal · 22 Nov 2005 at 22:52

Hi there, yes your right it has got frames & isn't following W3C recommendations so it's hardly good clean code but just wanted to see If I could be found in a search engine.
When you say you found me you mean google brought up my post on this forum.
Thanks for your help anyway.

Beansprout · 22 Nov 2005 at 22:58

LeperousDust said:
Meta data i think is often (always?) ignored by most major search engines. Google reads through your web page, including all the links and so fourth and gives it a rank from that, its "pidgeon rank" system, its somewhere on its website, but i'm not sure it covers how it works.

The more people that link to your website with the work "Childcare" or whatever as the link the more "points" your website gains .

Good clean code, ie XHTML and CSS is also needed cause that has weighting too, i know for pretty much a fact your website isnt that, i think it had frames did it not? Hope this helps anyways, obviously if you need any help recoding your website nicey were all here for you .

//Edit:
I did find you

Although it seems you've got major competition with your URL for starters!

It's PageRank, pidgeon rank was the joke paper

And the quality of code has 0% impact on rankings - Content content content is where it's at, although sensible markup of headers will, it's generally agreed, help discern the focus of the page.

META tags are pretty obsolete now, they're hardly used at all. One of the main things they're used for is to show a description of your site underneath search rankings, so make the description intelligible

And search engines won't understand frames (so far as I know / have seen anywya) so you're stuffed from that point of view

/\/\j17 · 22 Nov 2005 at 23:09

Have you submitted the pages to the search engines? If they don't know your there, they won't pay you a visit.

Meta tags aren't that important these days, but they ARE parsed as part of the indexer process so you they are worth using to provide positive repition of important words/phrases or to add terms that don't naturally occure in the content of the page.

Some search engines (Google included) use the content of the meta description tag if it's there as the "details" part of an entry on the results screen. If you search for "Channel4" on Google the top result reads

"channel4.com
Welcome to Channel 4. Featuring the best of channel 4 shows, features, news,
television listings and interactive content."

The 'Welcome to Channel4. Featuring...' bit is the content of the meta description tag. View source on www.channel4.com/index.html if you don't believe me ^_^

Augmented · 22 Nov 2005 at 23:49

Beansprout said:
Content content content

And just in case you missed that, here it is again

.

Beansprout said:
Content content content

There are various tricks you can do to help - some are effective, some are not so. A lot of search engine optimisation is speculative - you try something for a fortnight, and if it's not working, you try something else. There are no set rules for getting a good ranking, other than keeping a site active and knowing exactly what your aims are. Otherwise you'll end up shooting in the dark.

Don't worry yourself whatsoever if you're not ranking for words like "childcare", "children" or "sutton" because no prospective clients will be searching for that. You should be aiming for top spot for something like "childcare in sutton". Target the important consumer keyphrases and get inbound links that consist of relevant anchor text like "sutton childcare", "nottinghamshire childminders" and so on.

Be sure to read Spinner's excellent SEO post in the archive, as this sums up the fundamental parts of SEO.
Also, an article at SEOChat regarding optimising a frames based site.

If you wish to check if your site has been indexed, then following Google keyword operators are useful:

Code:

info:www.yoursite.com/

Shows what Google knows about that URL.

Code:

site:www.yoursite.com/

Shows what pages from that URL have been indexed.

Simply typing in the URL is usually good enough to get an indication of whether a search engine is even aware of a site.

Lagz · 23 Nov 2005 at 00:20

Decent search engines like google will pick you site up automatically if it is linked to from another site.

Most decent search engines these days use page rank to decide how high up the results you are. Basically each page has a rank, and passes a proportion of this rank on to pages it links to. So to get high up you need to be linked to from lots of pages, or linked to by a few high ranking pages (if that makes sense).

/\/\j17 · 23 Nov 2005 at 11:14

Lagz said:
So to get high up you need to be linked to from lots of pages, or linked to by a few high ranking pages (if that makes sense).

Which reminds me - is Google still vulnerable to Blog bombing?

I remember 12 monts or so back Google had a big problem with blogs cross linking to one another and scewing them up the rankings (as an example, one blog would link to a site that sells cheese, the others blogs would all link to the first blog and the blog, not the site selling cheese would top the listings for a search on "buy cheese").

Anyone know if there was one of the famous Google 'tweaks' to counter this or not? If not, get lods of friends to set up blogs and link to you

LeperousDust · 23 Nov 2005 at 17:58

Beansprout said:
It's PageRank, pidgeon rank was the joke paper

*Blushes* I knew that

Well even if it doesn't take much note of the cleanliness of the code, its still nice to have it like that. Frames = no no though!