I have a small business and I hired someone to create a website to help advertise my furnished rental condos to prospective vacationors. However, whenever I try to use any search engine to find this site, it never appears as a match. Any set of keywords that I use (including the site name) will not lead to my site. I feel like I am stranded on a desert island.
The web site creator told me that I must pay the various search engines a fee before anybody can actually use yahoo, google, etc to find me.
I just want to say that I know someone who finds celebrity fan sites all the time and I seriously doubt that this teenage-run areas are paying to be found by any search engine.
It’s called web positioning. Look that up in Google and you’ll find lots about what you have to do even after you’ve registered with the search engines. Here is software that does it for you. Happy searching.
Sad but true. Well, maybe not absolutely no chance, but the odds are increasingly bad as every day passes.
It takes time for your site to appear on a search engine. Some search engines work better than others. Some won’t take any new entries any more. Some will give priveleges to those who pay. Some don’t do any of that and use their own unique rules for how sites appear.
The main problem, though, is the sheer volume of sites out there, and the way some people use sneaky methods and some don’t to try and stay on top of the lists every day.
It sucks. I tell my clients to give up on search engine status, and just stick with self-promotion and exchanging website referrals.
The web is still kind to people who provide free services and useful content. Since you’re located at a vacation spot, if you provide an entire “travellers guidebook” with local points of interest, restaurant reviews, user forums, links to other local websites, etc., etc., your site might attract attention. (Do other such sites exist for your locale? If not, then you can still be first.) But if all you want to do is to rent condos, maybe the yellow pages are a better deal.
There are some seearch engines for which your site will come up in the top of the search results if you pay a small fee. Snap.com was one of these… but they went under. Big surprise, eh?
Just what we need… NBC controlling what we can find on the net.
Seriously though… you can submit your site to the search engines by going to their main page and looking for something like ‘webmasters’ or a similar link. It may take up to a month for your site to start appearing on the search. You may also want to add a few “meta keyword” tags to the home page (do not forget to use “sex” as one the keywords). I did this, and now my site shows up in front of some sites that I personally think are more relevant than mine.
A good place to start is asking your designer to add meta tags, and especially a title tag. If this person asks for more money to do it, I would consider doing some research on the Web for a company that specializes in tagging sites, like http://www.intercongroup.com
They worked with one of our Web clients and it seemed to work. not sure how much they charge but there are plenty of companies out there who do that sort of thing, so look around.
What I noticed they did was add keywords to the title tag (which makes for an ugly title, but helps), added lots of specific meta tags, and tagged every image on the site with keywords instead of descriptive “alt” tags. Of course, I’m sure they also did all the submitting to search engine stuff that is a pain to do.
If you are serious about Web presence (and you should be, because it’s a great way to advertise), I highly recommend seeking out a company to help you or doing some research on what you can do to help yourself (it takes time but if you have more time than money, it’s good.)
On the contrary, do forget to add “sex”. The best that can happen from doing that is that someone surfing for porn will find your site instead, and not bother looking at it because it doesn’t have any sex. You don’t want folks surfing for porn to find your site, you want folks surfing for vacation condos to find it. As for the worst that can happen, many search engines (I seem to recall Google being one of these) will permanently delete your page from their database if they discover you using deliberately misleading keywords.
One other thing: You say your designer told you that you need to pay a search engine fee? Did he, by chance, tell you to just give him the money, and he’d take care of it? If that’s the case, get yourself a new web designer pronto, and tell the new guy to be sure to change all the passwords.
Try getting listed on http://www.dmoz.org - the Open Directory project - first. I remember reading something a while back about the other search engines using its index to make their own.
Sure enough, I got listed on Yahoo! not long after (as a web page not a web site).
But after several, multiple attempts, I did eventually get a proper Yahoo! listing. Try and try again.
Your page needs to be interesting and meet their criteria though. Plus mine was non-commercial.
It’s a slow, semi-automated process, getting listed on the WWW. Get your URL onto other pages (eg news pages, community pages), get it onto friends’s home pages that are already listed, get it onto smaller search engines, even if they sound really crappy. Eventually the spiders will find it.
Also - go to travel and tourism sites and send them little press release “announcments” of your new site. Some will have messageboards - so post about it there. Post about it on relevant newsgroups - they get archived on Google, and it’s all publicity.
Just don’t spam - make sure the sites are relevant.
I agree with GuanoLad, it can take a long time for it to appear in search engines & you should submit
to each one from their submit page, which should be free.