Getting listed in search engines
Some simple tips for getting your site listed in searches such as Google and Yahoo!:- Meta-tags are of limited importance - use them, but don't rely on them. Use Dreamweaver's "Head" tab on the Objects toolbar for easy editing of the meta-tags.
- Make sure your site is accessibile to people with disabilities. This has the added benefit of being more accessible to search engines! See http://contentor.net/install/index/help/assessibility for more details.
- Most important: go to http://dmoz.org and click thru the directory until you reach the section where your page should be listed. Submit your URL there. Write your summary description in a style to match the section where your listing will appear. A human (volunteer) editor will review your site & entry and will post as they see fit. Check back in about two weeks to see your posting...
- Most web hosts have free search engine submission services. Use them as a back-up. A few duplicate submissions won't hurt - overdoing it can get you kicked out of some engines...
- Go to http://www.google.com/addurl.html and submit there. Google uses the open directory ( http://dmoz.org ) data and sends out their own robots (googlebots).
- Create as many links to your site as possible. Google uses the number of links to your site as one part of the ranking (placement) criteria. More links = closer to the top of the search results (quality content makes an even bigger difference!). To this end, we are using a master cross-linking tool (more later on this)
- Make sure the search engine robots are "welcome" by placing a "robots.txt" file in the home directory containing:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
See http://www.robotstxt.org/ for more details.