4. Publicizing
How do you ensure that your lovely site is seen by someone other than your family?
It's a tricky process. The first and most important step is getting your site listed on search engines . There are lots of these and occasionally you'll receive emails sayings 'Register with us for a small fee and we'll get your site listed on 1,000 search engines!' Forget it, these are always obscure engines that no-one really uses or cares about. There are about 5, maybe 7 search engines that you need to worry about. Go to SearchEngine.com and check out their list.
The easiest way to get listed on the important search engines is to brew up a big mug of coffee, settle down and go to each one in turn manually inputting the details of your site. Tell them what the site's about, give them keywords that describe the site etc. That's the starter, although it doesn't necessarily guarantee you will be listed.
What are Meta Tags, and how do search engines use them?
Meta Tags are a hidden piece of code that you include on your web page and which some, not all, search engines will use to help them define what your site is about and better serve it to searchers. It doesn't always work, or guarantee a high placement in search results, but it's definitely worth putting them in anyway.
Any sneaky tricks to help improve my search ranking?
First and foremost, put a simple introductory paragraph on the top of your homepage describing clearly and concisely what your site is about and peppered with keywords that are relevant to your site, in other words the type of words you might type into a search engine if you were looking for your site.
Secondly when you put the title tag into your HTML pepper it with simple, useful keywords.
Thirdly, don't fill your homepage up with big, heavy images because people just won't hang around to wait for them to load. Keep your front page simple and welcoming and informative.
How do search engines decide whether to list your site or not?
Yahoo : is an unusual case in that each submitted site will be viewed, ranked and rated by a real, live, human person! However, most search engines rely on spiders - little programs that scuttle around the web collecting information about sites, looking at the meta tags, keywords and titles. Then they bring all this big haul of information back to the search engine which sifts through it and puts your site into their database after examining the information collected and deciding how to classify your site and rank it. Meanwhile, some other search engines use entirely bizarre methods of ranking !
But at the end of the day one thing is more important that anything else - build an interesting, original, well constructed site. Because without that there's really no point worrying about search engines at all!
Nedesing web develop team
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