I built a new website for my family about three weeks ago. I put in in appropriate meta-tags and some text with relevant key words and names on the main page. I submitted to google and other search engines through some free program that I found on download.com. I got back some confirmation e-mails from a few search engines so I know that it worked. However, my site does not show up on any of the search engines yet. The URL is recognized if you type it into the search bar but that is about it. One relevant detail might be that the site is mostly photos with only a minimal amount of text.
The questions I have are:
About how long will it take for it to show up.
Is there any way that I can speed this process up or easy legitimate ways that I can make the search results better.
The only way to get significant presence on search engines is to have other sites linking to you, and the bigger and more important sites the better. That’s the main way their ranking systems work. If there’s no external links whatsoever pointing to the site, it’s quite possible it’ll be dropped from the rankings entirely. So there’s no quick way round this - you need to build up contacts with other people, sharing links and so on (Google are desperatly trying to find ways to stop blogs from ‘clogging’ their results, due to the large number of links they tend to provide, but that’s another matter.)
I submitted my family tree website to DMOZ which Google uses, and I also submitted it to Google and about 10 other search engines. It took about a month or a little longer for it to start appearing in searches.
Also, don’t use your main email address for those search engine submissions, I used the one associated with my website (since I was told I’d need to confirm the search submissions with an email) and within a few months I was getting over 500 spam messages a day. I’ve since had to discontinue a very useful address that I had submitted to many family tree search sites
Bob55 and GorillaMan are exactly correct. Getting listed in Google and other search engines requires that these search engines can “find” your website. If you don’t have any incoming links to your site, chances are it’s going to be a while before these seach engines do indeed “spider” your site.
As GorillaMan has mentioned, get lots of incoming links from websites, as many as possible to start. When you have about 10-20 you should start showing up in very basic Google searches, but if you get 100-300 or so, you could start dominating for a few keywords/keyphrases.
As far as the email address SPAM problem, you can keep your favorite email address on your website, but you NEED to protect it from email address harvesting robots. Here is a great (and free) tool you can use to create a “spider proof” email address for your website:
http://www.proles.net/emailencoder/
Hopefully this is helpful! In time, Google and other search engines will start visiting your website (even daily as it does mine) and searches for your keywords will work properly. The MOST important thing you can do is to have lots of incoming links from other websites.
Did you build a “robots.txt” and put it into the route of your website? If not that will help as well. This keeps the spiders from picking up pages that they shouldn’t when they do their crawl.
Here is link that will help get you started if haven’t already.
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