getting a website into a search engine

hardc0re_tid · 23 Apr 2008 at 19:09

how is this done. ive just made a site for my dads mate and he would like to have it recognised by a search engine. do i need to register the site with say google?

noob here so go easy on me please

shifty_uk · 23 Apr 2008 at 19:43

http://www.google.com/addurl/
Also read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization

Meta tags would also be useful however, I have heard that major search engines(google for example) don't pay too much attention to this information as much these days.

dave-lew99 · 23 Apr 2008 at 20:02

Google especially these days rank your site higher or lower by popularity, i've noticed mine has crept ever higher for the same search terms.

Fill out the meta tags, make sure you have decent content and watch the logs for what hits you do get on searches - if theyre all wrong for the kind of visitor you want to attract then you need to rethink things.

Also, having links around your site doesn't hurt - but please don't make it a site full of links that's too annoying, plus linking to it from other places is good too - but not as spam, then you'll be ranked lower.

paulsheff · 24 Apr 2008 at 00:04

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Sign up for webmaster tools then include the meta tag provided on your pages.

Submit an xml sitemap to the webmaster tools.

Don't bother with meta keywords, but do include unique meta descriptions for each page. Make sure all your titles are unique as well.

Get as many inbound links from external relevant sites to the relevant pages on the site as possible.

Content, content, content...

Spider · 24 Apr 2008 at 07:23

paulsheff said:
http://www.google.com/webmasters/

Don't bother with meta keywords, but do include unique meta descriptions for each page. Make sure all your titles are unique as well.

I disagree. Definitely bother with key-words. Take seconds to do and it does have an influence on your SEO performance in various search engines. Google isn't the only search engine, and the % for live.com and yahoo have both increased of late from what I've read.

adam83 · 24 Apr 2008 at 09:49

Agree with paulsheff and Spider.

If you want decent ranking for competitive keywords there are no 'quick fixes' - well apart from adwords - but organically, you need to work on content and get as many links to that site as possible.

paulsheff · 24 Apr 2008 at 14:38

Spider said:
I disagree. Definitely bother with key-words. Take seconds to do and it does have an influence on your SEO performance in various search engines. Google isn't the only search engine, and the % for live.com and yahoo have both increased of late from what I've read.

Sorry you're right, what I meant was don't spend a lot of time on them as there are other on page techniques that will do more. It's bottom of the tree due to the abuse they've suffered over the years, but like Tesco, every little helps...

!bluetonic! · 24 Apr 2008 at 15:55

My tip..

Think what people will be typing in the search box to get to your site.
I.E. 'Dave The Plumber'
Then type 'Dave The Plumber' into Google. Have a look at the first site that comes back to see why it's top of the tree. Content and PageRank would be the most obvious reason.
Then make your site better than this in terms of wording and content and get as many people to link to you as possible.

Ol!ver · 7 May 2008 at 21:19

On a related subject, the pagerank for my site is 0. Any idea why that is? Got links to the site all over the place....