Getting recognized

[I_Deus]

I am somewhat new to Web Development and have a small (hopefully) question. I have had my site up for aound 6 months and have had it submitted to google and several other sites. The problem is when i search goolge for a META word I have in my header I do not come up. There are 85 results and my site is not listed? My site comes up if I search for my site name. I need my site to come up when a string is searched. how can I accomplish this?

Thank you

[mack]

When you talk about the "META word I have in my header" I assume you are refering to your meta keyword tag, for example...
<meta name="keywords" content="word1, word2">

To a very large extent meta tage are no longer being used by search engines. The reason for this is they where very easy to spoof and there are more acurate methods of gauging a pages true content nature.

Today search engines in effect read your page (as a user would) and analyse the page content. The search engine will then take lots of factors into account and decide what the page is about. Keyword density is one of the factors taken into account.

This means that is you have a webpage with 100 words on it and 10 of those words are the word "word1" then you have a fairly high keyword density for that word. This would make you fairly likely to rank well for that keyword.

It doesnt always work as easy as that, there are just so many factors that go into the Gogle algo.

Hope this is of some help.

Mack.

[Mohamed_E]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld, I_Deus!

It doesnt always work as easy as that, there are just so many factors that go into the Gogle algo.

Very true! I suggest that you start by reading Bretts excellent post on Successful Site in 12 Months with Google Alone [webmasterworld.com].

[pmkpmk]

Do you have access to your httpd-logfiles? If yes, does the GoogleBot show up in them? It would show up in the logfile like this:

crawler14.googlebot.com - - [28/Mar/2004:15:11:32 +0200] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 200 40 "-" "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html)"
 "-"

If you DON'T have access to your logilfes, or if you do but don't analyze them, then there's something you should work on :-)

[Dunkelberg]

I have the same problem, and I've been wondering if it's because I build the pages with MS Word 2000.
I do have googlebots. However, a search with the first words on my site and I don't show up at all.
Sigh.
p.s. I did get rid of frames and will continue from there.

[pmkpmk]

In Google, do a search with the searchphrase "site:www.mysite.com". This will list you all the pages GoogelBot has indexed so far. Try searchphrases from the indexed pages to see if they show up.

The searchphrase "link:www.mysite.com" will show you all inbound links (links from other sites pointing to you) Google recognizes for your site.

[HeyJim]

And, learn something about link building. Learn how to build up a large link presence for your site on the web. Search engines can be impressed when its done well.
It can help you get listed for the search terms that are important to you.

[Creampuff]

I’m very new to development and I’m also having some Google trouble.

1. When I search for my site on Google, it ranks third in the listing, but there is no description. How can I get a brief description to appear?

2. My site is updated daily and I’ve experimented searching on Google using phrases from recent posts—usually combining article titles with the author’s name. Google turns up multiple pages of links to my site from other sites with similar themes, but there is no actual listing for my site. I know a site’s ranking on Google is determined in part by how many other sites link to it, so I’m puzzled as to why I can uncover a multitude of links to the site but not the actual site.

I did the site index search suggest by pmkpmk and it yielded three pages of results, all from other sites. None of my pages were included. The site is four months old and it ranks decently with Yahoo and other search engines. Is there anything I can do to change this or must I just sit tight and wait for Google to find me?

Thanks!