I got a call earlier tonight from the young man who saved my life when I had my heart attack 13 years ago. He’s now in business for himself, in partnership with a cousin, with a brand-new startup small construction business in the Midwest (SE and East Nebraska, also willing to work in adjacent Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri). He has two websites promoting his business, but none of the common search engines seem to be picking up his web pages. Rather obviously, I want to be any help I can in getting his business going well – and I’m turning to my Doper friends for suggestions.
He suspects that it may be that he’s not incorporating keywords properly in his metatags to cause the spiders to log the pages. He’s not particularly interested in paying a search engine company to list him, which some of them do.
Does anyone have useful ideas to share with him on how to cause the search engines to make appropriate listings? Or other ideas on promoting his business to his prospective clientele?
Thanks in advance for any help that may be offered, particularly with the HTML metatags.
A good resource is search engines.com. IIRC, some of there info requires that you have a paid membership but a lot of the really important stuff is available for free.
Submission services are usually not a good idea because it can be important to customize your site and directory submissions for specific search engines and directories.
Another thing would be that you have to makes sure that his URL is in no way a “redirect.” For example if you type www.friendsbusiness.com it should not be forwarding to a members.aol.com site. “Redirects” are often used by spammers to try search engines (“oh, sure, the website is about Scooby-Doo today, but tomorrow it will redirect to porn instead!”)
I think I also have links to sites that talk about optimizing META tags, but that on my “at work” computer, so I’ll have to get those for you tomorrow.
Hi Polycarp
Yes, refining thier metatags will most certainly help. As will, hand submitting their url to the search engines. Make sure your pages are keyword dense. For instance…using the word “the” as a keyword, isn’t going to be very effective. Choose words that people will type into a search engine when you want them to find you…and make sure those words are on your pages in the content.
In the meanwhile, they can plaster their URL all over. IE: Use it in letterhead… as a signature in all email, etc. If they belong to any bulletin boards, use it in their profile. You’d be surprised how nosey some of us are.
Hope this helps a little.
Hand submits work quite well, though they take some time. I don’t know if I’d pay for any listings, honestly. My site (link below, heh) is in Google/Yahoo and most of your other major search engines, and I never spent a dime on it. Time helps. So does links from other sites. The thing to remember about search engines is that once you’re in one, you tend to slowly wind up being in all of them.
Oh, also, make sure he has lots of text related to what he does “above the fold” (the top 1/3 of the screen). I’ve heard lots of search engines factor that into their scores.
