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I am building a simple HTML page to promote my wares, how do I get this page into a search engine like yahoo or google?
I was told all I need to do is populate the META data in the HTML header, is that correct?
The easiest way to do this is to submit to big directories like yahoo, open directory project, best of the web, etc.
I tried that once on google without any luck, maybe I should try again.
Do make sure your site is accessible, though. Make sure your home page isn't Flash or text built-in to images, etc. Don't laugh - I've seen it happen, and then the owner wonders why they aren't in the search engines, or if they are in them, why the summary is blank.
Submitting to Google will do you no good whatsoever.
They will visit your site shortly after registration, and will visit periodically after that.
A site with no links may get indexed but is unlikely to appear for any searches. The internet is a group of linked documents. If you don't have links your site isn't part of the internet.
A site with no links may get indexed but is unlikely to appear for any searches. The internet is a group of linked documents. If you don't have links your site isn't part of the internet.
News to me. There are plenty of micro-niche sites that receive no links and yet come up on Page One on searches for that niche.
It's several years old now, but the basics are the same.
A site with no links may get indexed but is unlikely to appear for any searches.
I'm sorry, I am no "SEO expert" but this is 100% false. I have proven it to myself this is so.
The first "launch" of one of my example sites was almost three years ago. We decided right off to not put much weight on digging for links. There are many articles here demonstrating it's nowhere near as important as it was. So we went to work building pages with valuable content to our target market.
This, in itself, builds you good keyword-rich pages without keyword spamming. We submitted it to Google, MSN, and a couple other big dogs - that's all. No link directories. No 1999-recommended link building strategies. To date, we have maybe . . . . 10 pages linking to us?
This first site was page one on Google and MSN for our most important keywords, and no less than page 3 for less relevant keywords, in three months. As we develop more pages, it's appearing on more SERP pages for new keywords. Our current page rank is 2 (TWO.) We don't care. We have all the traffic, visits, and business we need at the moment, and in spite of a non-existent link strategy, traffic keeps climbing.
Example two: A community site for a small niche. On release, in two days it went to pages one and two for all important words in the site. This one's not fair - it's a very specific niche. But a perfect example that it's not links you need, it's content.
Last was a redesign of a horrid site for a trucking company, they have been with this site for 8 years and invisible in the SERPs. They had a total of 22 pages in the Google index. I reworked it for them, got them to provide relevant content (this was the HARD PART, getting the customer to provide content!) and in two weeks they were in page one and 1-5 for their relevant keywords.
I am not saying links are not important or useless. I am saying there are other more important factors to consider, and links are not the deciding factor in getting found. BUILD CONTENT, make it relevant, make it available to plain-text readers (which is what search engine spiders are.) If an idiot like myself can pull it off, so can anyone else. :-)
I am a newbie, so please let me clarify.
So if I build a simple page, say with a shopping cart, I don't have to do anything and google will eventually detect my page and add it into Google's database?
From there the trick is getting the bots to keep coming back.
It needs to know it exists, in other words you need a link somewhere for it to find you.
That's just not true - at least for Google.
Google will find you a few days after you register your domain name.
I'm not sure if this is because Google automatically searches new registrations, or because there are web sites that list new domain registrations, and their pages are in Google.
But I have several undeveloped domains with one-page websites that consist of nothing but the name of the domain as a title and text. They are indexed in Google.
So if I build a simple page, say with a shopping cart
Irrelevant to the present discussion, but I'd hope that your site consists of something more than a shopping cart!
Please clarify that you have your site on your own domain, and not as user page on some other site.
So being pedantic you are right to a point. And yes, it is possible to rank in a niche. But the person who asked the question is selling something, and it's probably fair to assume there is some competition. If your advice to him or her is to register a domain and wait for things to happen, you'll have done that person a great disservice. Is that what you think he should do?
Encyclo's reference to Brett's 26 steps is a lot more helpful.
[google.com...]
Although Google crawls billions of pages, it's inevitable that some sites will be missed. When our spiders miss a site, it's frequently for one of the following reasons:* The site isn't well connected through multiple links to other sites on the web.
* The site launched after Google's most recent crawl was completed.
* The design of the site makes it difficult for Google to effectively crawl its content.
* The site was temporarily unavailable when we tried to crawl it or we received an error when we tried to crawl it. You can use Google webmaster tools to see if we received errors when trying to crawl your site.
Furthermore, in their tips
[google.com...]
Make sure that other sites link to yours
Links help our crawlers find your site and can give your site greater visibility in our search results. When returning results for a search, Google combines PageRank (our view of a page's importance) with sophisticated text-matching techniques to display pages that are both important and relevant to each search. Google counts the number of votes a page receives as part of its PageRank assessment, interpreting a link from page A to page B as a vote by page A for page B. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
And yes, of course content is important.
I've registered a domain name and I am in the process of building a web page. So at the moment, I have a HTML page for that URL, with a few words on it, but I have put key wards in the META header field.
From the discussion, looks like META field is not used?
Most domain names are registered and parked. Google may wander in - and, yes, I've seen plenty of sites indexed with no links - but if parked for anytime stops coming back.
One parked domain looks pretty-much like any other parked domain. Certainly just about identical to the thousands to millions of domains parked with the same registrar.
My undeveloped domains aren't parked. I can pretty-much guarantee that the are the *only* sites with their particular content - i.e. their domain names and nothing else.
I've had some of these "parked" this way for a year or two, and Google keeps coming back. (I can tell from the server logs.) So, I feel pretty confident that when I add content, Google will pick it up quickly.
Yes, Brett's 26 steps are a great set of guidelines. But that isn't what this post was about. It's about getting the search engines to pay attention to you in the first place. My contention is you don't have to do anything for that.
I also think you can "try too hard" and the SEs are getting smarter about recognizing that.
My most successful site (now sold) ranked #5 for my city of >1,000,000 people. I never did any formal SEO. I did have useful links out about my city, and some great links in. In particular, every site that ranked higher than mine linked to my site, and was a government site. I don't think I ever asked any of those sites to link to mine. Now, that's organic linking.
Pay attention to the needs and desires of your users. Beyond that, maybe SEO can give you a nudge in the rankings based on the flavor of the week. Or not. Or might even push you down for trying too hard.
I'd like to point out that Brett's "26 steps" focus primarily on the satisfying your users, and not on SEO. In fact, he warns against gimmicks and the "flavor of the week". So, I think our philosophies are aligned.
From the discussion, looks like META field is not used?
Depends on the search engine. They certainly pay less attention to METAs than they once did. Google, in particular, doesn't use them.
But the person who asked the question is selling something, and it's probably fair to assume there is some competition.
If they're selling something that nobody else is selling, Google will beat a path to their door.
If they're selling something that thousands of others sites are selling (at least online) ... well, good luck. I hope there's something unique about they way they are selling it.
So if I build a simple page, say with a shopping cart, I don't have to do anything and google will eventually detect my page and add it into Google's database?
jtara answered this succinctly and in subsequent replies,
They will visit your site shortly after registration, and will visit periodically after that.
So yes. Submitting to Google seems to speed up the process, maybe, not proven (IMO) but it doesn't hurt.
They certainly pay less attention to METAs than they once did. Google, in particular, doesn't use them.
We should embellish this a little - the meta keyword field is greatly abused and largely ignored - but the meta description tag is not only important, improper use can hurt you with G.
If you drop the same meta description tag across every page of a site, this may cause pages to be ignored because G will see the descriptions are all the same, so all these pages are the same. No reason to index the same page more than once, right?
Second, the description tag, if present, is the "snippet" you see in Google search results following the title tag. So it's important to make sure this is unique for every page of the site and descriptive of it's contents.
Either that, or not use it at all - if not present, spiders will pick up the description from the first few blocks of text on the page.
so if I create a html page with the words "big potato" in the title and in the page, Google will eventually seek me out and add to the database.
So in a few weeks time, I type in "big potato" in Google, is should come up?
So in a few weeks time, I type in "big potato" in Google, is should come up?
Not necessarily. But that wasn't the question.
It was "how to get your web page into the search engine".
Not "how to get your web page into the search engine for "big potato".
If big potatoes are popular, you might get in, but at # 1,954,541.
If yours is the only site featuring big potatoes, it's pretty likely that your site will shortly show-up as the #1 or only site for the term, though.
I've proven that with my "domain name only" sites.
Since I started making the effort to tailor titles to pages I have been getting some good results on searches that didn't register in the top 100 pages before. In particular my photo pages, which have minimal textual content, are now getting on page 1 with searches on some of the subjects.
