How to get your site onto Search Engines

Hi

No need to submit your URL search engine spiders WILL find your site.

1]
The first page of a site is the most important from a search engine point of view - the text on your "index.htm" page should total about 250 words. Into this 250 words pick a keyphrase that people are likely to search on, for the instance of my site I use "online shopping directory". I use this phrase six times (these terms can also be used in hyperlinks). Also, in the instance of my site the repetition of "UK" is used. It is important to incorporate these keywords into the site for search engines to rank it accordingly.

Note: I have used heading tags <h1></h1> at the top of the page with the text 'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory... No.1 Shopping Online' - this indicates to a search engine spider the start of the content and includes the keyphrase.

So what have I done here?
The repetition of keyphrases has made a positive indication to a search engine that this page is to do with an online shopping directory, the repetition reinforces that.

2]
The page title - I never use more than ten words, there is little worth writing more... I repeat the 'UK Online Shopping Directory' keyphrase here, that I mentioned in point 1. On pages further into the site I use different titles that are relevant to the page category or the product I am selling.

3]
Keywords: Ideally each page should have different keywords but their importance has diminished considerably as search engines tend to look moreso at content rather than the keywords tag - so don't go to too much trouble. If you do only use a maximum of 25 keywords, it is not worth typing more as a spider will not pick all of them up after a certain threshold limit.

Also, no word should be used more than three times, otherwise the effectiveness of your keywords may be diluted.

4]
Description: Ideally each page should have different keywords but again the importance of the description tag has diminished considerably and it is not worth going to much trouble. Limit your descriptions to around 25 words.

5]
CSS: Always place CSS in an external file and call it in i.e.
<LINK
href="http://www.website.com/css.css&quot; type=text/css
rel=stylesheet>

- if there is lots of CSS style sheet code on your site, this will cause search engines to perceive relevant text as being much further down the page, and therefore less important than it actually is.

6]
Images: always make use of the alt attribute and give images a keyword specifiic name, i.e. if you have an image of a villa in spain call the image villa_in_spain.jpg

see the full tag below...

<img src="villa_in_spain.jpg" alt="Large 6 bed Villa in Spain" border="0">

make sure that your images are also optimised for the web.

7]
Getting Reciprocal Links:

Then, when requesting reciprocal links stay completely relevant to your own subject area (and I tend to stay Country specific aswell - since I run a UK Directory) opinions may vary on this point.

Whilst images as reciprocal links look nice, they are not as powerful as keyworded text links - I request from other webmasters to have:

'Shops Net UK Online Shopping Directory' - (or variations of this)

as it strengthens the view that search engines will have of my page(s) - i.e. lots of incoming links saying the page is to do with shopping in the UK... compounding this is the keyword density of the phrases on the homepage that are saying the same thing. It is this combination that will make your search engine positioning move up the rankings.

NOTE: Not dead sure on Google's latest shuffle, but I believe the reciprocal link is now less powerful. Getting a high rank now is based on lots of inbound links pointing at your site

All the Best
Phil

One other thing, CONTENT IS KING - lots of unique content. Look at this site. It has unique content added to it every moment of the day. This encourages regular spidering by search engines.

Alot of categories on Dmoz have not been updated for quite a while now, therefore it contains broken links etc - not worth bothering with it, just make sure you're listed in Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.

If you Google about Dmoz you'll see it has a very bad reputation.