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Web Page Help

Hello Doug
Everything uploaded, everything including email all working fine.
Thanks for your help, your quick guide is excellent.
The next thing to do is to get our site registered with the search engines, which is the next problem - ie I have no idea what to do next.
Any advice would be most welcome on contacting the companies involved (is there one central agency??) and maximising our hit rate.
Regards Simon Parker
http://www.wolds-gliding.org

Hi Simon

Ok
had a quick peep
Nice site !

But.....
you are NOT ready to submit your site to ANY search engine yet
None of your pages have any META TAGS
So if you do submit any pages you'd be wasting your time.

I'll explain it simply here - I don't know your level of capability so if it is over simplified - forgive me.

A spider is the name given to the program that goes to search your site once it is informed you want it to search it. ie....you send a message to altavista - add a page - saying "Hey Guys, I got this great page and its here: www.etc etc"

This kicks the spider into action and it trawls its way along to your site and picks up snippets of info from it in order for eg. altavista to add some info about your great page.

Now then.....the spider actually searches for meta tags.
A meta tag is a piece of information the spider looks for in your pages in order to offer the enquirer at the search engine a synopsis of what your site is about.

It would be easier if the spider just took info from the content of your page - but life is never that simple is it.

So...the upshot is you got to add meta tags
Don't panic....it ain't that hard.
Open your first index page in Notepad.
Underneath:
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Title of your page here</TITLE>
you need to insert something like this:
<META NAME="description" CONTENT="This is a phrase about what your site is all about and what the viewer can expect to find. Keep it under 180 characters long">

Just add the two paragraphs to EVERY ONE of your pages.
The description is sometimes picked up by spiders and is used to describe your site.
So if you had a hotel your description field may be:
"We are the best hotel on the planet!"

The keywords field is just that - a listing of all the keywords on your site. If you had a hotel you would include: Blackpool, hotel, guesthouse, b&b, inn, lodging, accommodation in this part
****NOT*** we, are, the, best, hotel, in, the, world etc etc
Place these tags in ALL OF YOUR PAGES and - it helps to make them slightly different on each page

OK....
Now that you have done all that you need to go to EVERY search engine and directory you can find.
In our opinion its not worth purchasing software that does this for you as these tend to just submit to links pages which soon become clogged up and nobody reads them

If you submit to the engines listed below for starters this will produce about 90% of your traffic.
Look for a link on their main page which states:
Add Page | Submit | Submit Your Page | Suggest a Site |
or words to that effect
and simply click on the link and complete the fields
We suggest it is best to submit EVERY page unless stated
Some of the engines say this is not necessary - but they don't tend to grab your whole site unless you do.
OK...here goes
http://www.altavista.com
http://www.infoseek.com
http://www.excite.co.uk
http://www.northernlight.com - just submit main page to this one
http://www.webcrawler.com
http://www.lycos.co.uk
http://www.hotbot.com
http://www.anzwers.com

That lot should keep you busy for a while
The engines can take up to two weeks to index you but if they havn't by then you'll have to try again....it really is a laborious task BUT - worth doing if you want to increase traffic to your site.
You should also submit to any half decent one you come across and consider doing reciprocal links with other webmasters.
OK....this one is the biggie - if you can get in Yahoo you'll definately increase traffic.
This is a little different as Yahoo is a directory - not a search engine.
First of all go to:
http://www.yahoo.co.uk
Do a search for your first three keywords
Enter (click on the link) the Yahoo page which is most suitable to your website.
At the bottom is a link entitled Suggest a Site
Click on it and follow the prompts - 4 or 5 pages.
YOU MUST READ EVERYTHING THEY SAY ON THE PAGES
Yahoo are getting really strict on submissions and tend not to inform you if you try and submit incorrectly - READ THE DO'S and DONT'S

Have fun....and once you have submitted all your pages allocate one day per month in resubmitting new pages you have added - and look for new search engines - you cannot have enough links pointing back to your site!!!