Increasing Search Engine Visibility
Probably the question I most get asked is "WHY CAN'T I FIND MY SITE ON GOOGLE" or "HOW CAN I GET MORE TRAFFIC". This is probably the hardest area to understand when constructing a site, here are a few basics and useful links.
Google Yahoo Bing and other search engines
Do not expect your site to appear on the search engines instantly,
they are good but but not that good. The web is very very big with thousands of new
sites being created every day. It might take
up to a couple of months until the search
bots discover and crawl your site. Setting
meta tags for description helps as does a
descriptive title. Also you can try adding your
site manually
Google Add URL
Yahoo Submit Info
Bing Submit Site
Meta Tags
Google Yahoo and Bing all CLAIM that "THEY DO NOT USE THE KEYWORDS META TAG" but
anything that could help should be used so
add it anyway. Far more important are the
TITLE and DESCRIPTION of a page. They
should be concise and relevant to the
content of the page. You can set title,
keywords and description for any html page
from the page options in the building tool
(xtgem sites only). Search engines
should (no guarantees) use the description
and title when they finally list your site.
Search Engine Pages About Meta Tags
Google
Yahoo
Bing
There are a whole load more meta tags you
can add to your pages. "NONE OF THESE TAGS
WILL IMPROVE PAGE RANK", although some
serve other special purposes. Sometimes
you will NOT want search engines to list a
page. For this use a special meta tag (there
is no guarantee)
Toplists And
Directories
Join every good and genuine one that you
can find.
Join
Mobpartner and see their auto
submit tool and Banners Exchange tool.
Check out
igloo.mobi
Facebook,
Twitter, Guestbooks And Forums
Post your url on as many as you can but
don't be surprised or upset if the
moderators delete your posts. Promote your
site on as many social networks as you can
find. Create facebook and twitter pages and
add their buttons and widgets to your
site.
Content
It is very important to understand that
content is a priority in any site. If you put in
enough hard work to provide your users
with quality original content, your site will
eventually attract attention and become
popular. Try to keep your page code valid
and free from errors. Search engine bots do
not like errors or invalid code, you can use
online services to check your html.
W3C
validator servicesOnlinewebcheck.com
Images And
Image Search
The images on your site are another tool in
improving your visibility. Give them proper
names and alt texts that actually mean
something, for example
"little_fluffy_bunny.jpg" means a lot more to
a search engine than "lfb001.jpg"
A Simple
Google Search Box
This is the same code as produced by the
site search widget with the addition of a
check box for search within a domain
For non xtgem sites, replace
'<xt:url type="domain" />' with your site name.