I’ve done some preliminary searching for info, but I have a few specific questions that dopers might know about.
I’m starting a small business which sports a website. I need some tips on how to make it appear on search engine results (I’ve googled the actual name of the site and it didn’t show up even then).
I know that keywords is one strategy, but I don’t quite get how they work. Do they have to appear on the site itself? Or can they be written within the code - in order to attract search engines - but not be seen on the pages? If so, how is this accomplished?
My site is only a couple days old. Could this be part of the reason it is not find-able via search?
Finally, I’ve run across some sites that say they will bring searchers to your site (for a fee, of course). I have a feeling that most of these are scams, but perhaps some are legit?
I’m not an expert but I have run a site for 10+ years with ups and downs so…
If you just posted your site for the first time, it can take from days to months for Google to find it and index it, even if you use one of those submission services. Alternatively, if you can get someone whose site is already indexed to post a link to your site, you will get found the next time Google crawls their site (typically a few days.)
But that’s just to get indexed by Google and is a far cry from showing up on the first page (preferably) of searches for the main keywords relevant to your site.
Look around on the net for “seo tutorials” and sites like that. And get a (recent!) book on SEO.
Google has something like a couple hundred factors they use to determine ranking for any given search and some of the main ones, not in order, are;
Content relevant to the search. Not too much, and not too little
Inbound links
Good ‘organization’ of the site and ‘clean’ construction of each page (use of header tags, no broken links, etc. etc.)
Age of site ; ‘old is gold’.
There are also several things you can be penalized for;
Hiding text using ‘white on white’ for example - an old trick to ‘pack’ sites with keywords. (Your ‘keywords that don’t show on the page’ could fall into that.)
Links to sites they’ve determined as ‘adult’ , ‘x-rated’, or they’ve otherwise marked as ‘evil’.
Participation in ‘link farms’ or related link-spamming.
Make an XML sitemap (I recommend KeyLimeTie software for this). Upload it to your site. Tell Google where it is via the above account.
Set up a ROBOTS.TXT file and tell Google where it is via the above. Include ROBOTS metatags on each page.
Work out about 20 key words or key phrases, and use them in the following:
Make sure you have relevant DESCRIPTION metatags for each page. Each DESC tag should be different throughout the whole site, and relevant to that page.
Make sure each TITLE tag is different per page throughout the site. Where you can, lead with your chosen key terms in each title. E.g. “Golf equipment in Buttfuck Idaho from Acme Golf Unlimited” for the homepage, not “Acme Golf Unlimited - great equipment to help your game in Buttfuck Idaho”.
Ignore the KEYWORDS metatag. It does nothing.
Make sure that the keywords and phrases you’re interested in are sprinkled throughout human-readable text on each page.
Put the heading of each page in H1 tags, using chosen keywords.
Google, and other search engines, find sites by following links from sites they already know about. If no other sites link to you (and if you don’t tell them directly) search engines have no way of knowing that your site exists, and it will never be indexed.
Some, maybe most, are legit, but they can’t do anything more for you than the sorts of things jjimm suggested you do for yourself for free.
Two things: 1. you say “index,follow” and it’s unambiguous; 2. Google asks for one. It might not actually help, but if Google is telling you it’s good housekeeping, then why rock the boat, especially when it’s so simple to do?
I’ve got many sites to #1 on Google for given key phrases, and in the top 10 in others, but it usually takes months for changes to have any effect. Getting others to link to you, preferably via key phrases/keywords, particularly if they’re large/respected sites, is another accelerated way to shout your existence to Googlebot.
There are a few SEO toolbar extensions you can get - particularly in Firefox. I’d recommend downloading one. When I say “large sites” above, I mean ones with good “pagerank”, which is a crucial criterion for SEO within Google; the toolbar will tell you how well your site - and the sites you want to link to you - are doing wrt pagerank.
Also good is getting a blog that uses blogging software owned by Google - Blogspot and Blogger, though I hear that Wordpress is similarly indexed - that FTPs into a directory on your website domain, registering it with Google News, and keeping it refreshed, current and keyword packed, and cross-referencing it into your site.
Another technique is to write press releases that use key phrases, and distribute them on the free newswires with links to your site embedded in them. Doesn’t matter if they’re not earth-shattering, as you only really care that the search engine spiders pick them up from the newswire sites.
ETA: I should add that opening a Google AdWords account and spending a few $$ with it is not meant to influence the organic indexing of your site, but… :dubious:
Perhaps you should tell us why you think they are at all similar.
They are both forms of marketing, I guess, and perhaps all marketing is a little bit icky, but spamming is a particularly antisocial form of marketing, whereas SEO is a relatively benign form, so far as I can see.
Link blogs. Blog comments that say “This celebrity sure is famous” and just happen to contain a link back to some other website. The occasional runs through this place. Hell, some people still think dumping links on Usenet will have a positive effect.
Well, that is only one aspect of SEO, and probably not a very effective method. Anyway, who do link blogs harm? You don’t have to visit them. They do not flood into your inbox the way spam tries to do.
Are you suggesting that MMMshouldn’t be allowed to try to attract traffic to his site? That all (or any) of the SEO methods suggested by jjimm are obnoxious?
Or, instead of doing all this stuff that has been mentioned, you could spend that amount of time making sure that your website has accurate & meaningful content, stuff that people find useful. That’s the legitimate way to attract traffic to your website.
If it’s got good, useful info, then your visitors will take care of much of this publicity, by posting about your site, linking to it, etc., so you won’t have to do that. Leaving you even more time to make the content of your website better.
Oh, and be patient. A few days is nothing. Give it a few months at least.
The whole reason for Google’s being is ranking by incoming links. “The more places that link to a site, the more important it must be” is how they originally wrote the program. Of course, once spammers caught on to it, it became an ugly race to the top.
The spammers are spending millions of dollars on SEO. If no legitimate sites ever spent the time, effort and money getting their sites ranked or at least tied to the proper keywords, you’d never be able to find anything on the Web - it would all be spam.
It absolutely sucks that it works like this, but it’s how it works. If there were no spammers there’d be a lot less for legitimate sites to do. If you just put a site up and sit back and wait for people to come, it’s never going to happen.
Meaning that if legitimate websites don’t do this kind of thing too, they get lost in all the noise from the scams.
What I’m suggesting is the legitimate way to attract traffic to your website. They’re not mutually exclusive, and there is absolutely nothing shady or untoward in what I’m suggesting: it’s what Google itself tells legitimate businesses to do! Read the Google Webmaster blog at my link above.
If a website has accurate and meaningful content, and it is arranged per Google’s own recommendations, it’s likely to do better than one with similar content that isn’t so arranged.
This approach has served me well - but it did take a while to get there. I experimented initially with playing the link-oriented social networks like Digg and StumbleUpon, but it’s hard work for a fairly short-term benefit and can backfire if people feel they’ve been tricked into visiting a link.
Making sure your site is properly indexed in the search engines, then adding relevant, useful or interesting content seems to work well enough as a way to get repeat visitors. It’s probably not easy to achieve meteoric popularity this way, but fame is fickle anyway.
I have never heard of the ROBOTS.TXT standard including any syntax like that. There is certainly no sign of it 