Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So how does one get a site seen quickly by Google? (I know I should care about the other search engines but I'm gonna deal with the one that all clients care about).
As far as how does one "get seen quickly" by G, that's anyone's guess...and, you can't. You know all about the "Sandbox" right? If not you can search this forum (via SE) and find the threads on that. If the domain is new, it could be "locked in the bowels of cyberspace" for up to a year. You won't have this problem of course with SE's OTHER THAN G. "Build it, they will come", that is, all except G. G is a lost cause. Even if you make one of the new G sitemaps, if the domain is new you're still going to be blacklisted in G.
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Google does pay some attention to your TITLE tag, however, the H1 tag is much more respected. Your description may be used for your snippet if it seems to suit the algorithm at any given time.
For content based sites, I don't use descriptions (forcing Google to use proper snippets focused on the searcher's keywords works better for general content pages), I use the same H1 as Title, and I use a few keywords for the benefit of other engines.
To get your site seen, focus upon the human visitors first. Get some links from other related sites so that your visitors will be lead to your new site. The search engines will come soon enough, you don't need to worry about them.
It is good practice to have both the meta keywords and title tags in. Some search directories IF they find your site and add you to their index use these fields as the default link text.
However getting it 'seen' by Google is the easy bit - what your clients are probably looking for is a high postition and that is a much trickier proposition. Rising up the ranks will be slow, especially if the site is in a competitive area, but from the get go you can drive traffic from Google by using AdWords.
For sure read up about the 'sandbox' effect, but this effect is far from black and white - not all new sites experience it and sometimes it is blamed when in fact other factors are at fault.
Google doesnt ignore description tags at all, it uses them for its descriptions of websites in it SERP's if it cannot find any content or if it just hasnt pulled the content from the site yet.
Yes, Google displays them, but I do not believe it uses them for ranking purposes. And without them, it will make its own snippet from the relevant parts of your page to the search terms.
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So I'm not the only one?
(I won't know if you reply to this since the forum will not send out email notifications).So I'm not the only one?
There is a very useful feature in the Control Panel called 'My Threads', I suggest you take a look at it :)
(I won't know if you reply to this since the forum will not send out email notifications).So I'm not the only one?
This makes 3. I thought my email was having problems. I've written WebmasterWorld twice now and no reply. This will surely hurt the attendance at WebmasterWorld unless they get it fixed. this has been going on for over 2 months now.
But because of sandbox, you're not likely to be in top of SERPs too fast.
As for meta description, make a few pages with the same description, and I'll be surprised if this will not result in duplicate content, even if actual page contents were different!
I did this, and thought I'd be included in the index in a few days, or at least a few weeks. A month and half later, still no appearance in the index. It doesn't always work.
I don't where you saw that, but G doesn't ignore meta tags. They seem to use the <title> tag
Nitpick: The <title> tag is not a <meta> tag.
