Christian and Beccy

iTrader: (14)

Once you have built a Web Page, what is it that makes it appear on search engines, such as Google??

I know that when you carry out a Google search, you expect an amount of results that is condusive with how popular what you are searching for is, but how do you appear in the search results at all?

I have just added a news item on our Homepage which I would like to be 'Searchable' on Google and cannot find it for trying, I tried with an older item (over 18 months old) and cannot find that either!!

Daveyboy

http://www.google.co.uk/services/

show em ya money

Anonymous

Submit the site to them, make sure it is well worded, search on it reguarly (from different IPs) and click it in the results to make it look popular.

I used to work for a company where they did all that sort of shit (not me personally i just wrote back end programs for them) and it works remarkabley well if you can be bothered with it, the company i used to work for would guarentee a top 10 place on certain words on google and thats without ever giving google a penny.

As davey says though, works better if you pay them!

timb551

Search Engine Optimisation (Things to look for)


ALT Tags on images and buttons
When hovering over images you should get a little pop up, see www.bbc.co.uk for examples.

Links Page (In and out)
Does the website have a links page linking to other sites? Do other sites link to their website?

Correct Content
Male sure that there is plenty on content on the site, mentioning their products and company name a fair amount.

Proper CSS


Header Tags


Sub pages in sub folders
When going to sub areas on the site make sure that the pages are in subfolders.

Flash
If a site is full of clever rolling effects this is flash. Double check by right clicking on the effect and it will say built in Flash.
Search engines cannot search flash images.

Entrance pages
Any page before the main page of the website is bad!

Adworks
A product from Google. Allows users to purchase particular words at a particular click rate.

Frequency of updates
Do they have a news section or a new products section? The more the website is updated the better.






Google looks at all the above, at least a the moment, Google is constantly changing how it rates pages.

Good book to read http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...195929-3597521

timb551

Copy and pasted from an internal document, so not written very well sorry.

Billabong

You also have no keywords or meta tags - these are still of importance (some think they aren't), as long as they are relevant to the text within the page.

You can't really treat web design as anything other than a whole, the search engine placement needs to be considered when constructing and populating the page with content, not as an after thought (well you can, but you'll struggle to get decent placings - and ones that stand the test of time, it's an on-going process and fresh content )

http://spider-food.net/ It's a shame that the main site is down for redevelopment, but the forums may yeild some useful tips.

First step is sort out the meta-tags and revise content if required, then you should really submit your site to the search engines - best to do manually as opposed to some wonderous "Submit to 500,000 search engines in one go" web page or program.

Loads of info on the internet about SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), it's a whole business in itself really - literally (although needn't be!)