appearing in a search engine

[Juanita]

Hi Im very new to the webmaster world and am wanting to know what has to be done to make my websites appear in search engine results.

I use golive and want to know if entering keywords is all that suitable or if you should 'register' with search engines so your site is listed when a serach is conducted.

[SmallTime]

Hi and welcome to WWM.
The best thing you can do is a bunch of reading here, use the site search above, and look at Search Engine World.

In general keywords are fading in importance, some folks don't bother with them. Google will find your site if a good site in its index links to you, or you are listed in DMOZ (the Open Directory Project), or Yahoo.

Read the past site submission threads for more, most sites charge for submission these days, and you should get a picture of what to expect before doing that.

[papabaer]

Hello Juanita!
I'd like to add my welcome to Smalltime's, he has already offered the best advice. Webmaster World holds a wealth of information as well as many, many informed and helpful members.

Links, links, links! The importance of these will become clear as you read through the many threads. The more quality links you can get pointing to your sites the better. The search engines will find you as they follow links from site to site. Be sure to use keyword rich, plain old text hyper-links...

[Marcia]

Juanita, the value of the meta keywords tag has diminished, but the actual optimization of a site is based on a foundation of choosing the most relevant keyword phrases that people will search for to be able to find your site at the search engines and using them in text, page titles, H1-H6 tags and text links within the site. Also, use meaningful file names rather than page06.html

You can use the keyword tool at Overture to see how many searches are done for the phrases you feel are suitable, and compare to see which are the best to apply by popularity and also in relation to how many sites you're competing with at the search engines.

[inventory.overture.com...]

It's generally better to aim for 3 and 4 word phrases to start out with and work your way up. They're usually very targeted and easier to rank for.

Read the guidelines carefully and submit to ODP: [dmoz.org...] as well as finding quality sites related to the theme of your site in order to exchange links with them. Go for quality and value when looking for sites to link with.

Download the Google toolbar, it's a big help. You'll find all the details you need here at the board; do a lot of reading, it's time well spent.

[DaveN]

Juanita,

Also try [espotting.com ] for keywords.

Also keep your old pages after tweeking if you make a mistake which harms your ramking you can always revert back to a older version.

and only make a few change at a time or you will never no if it was the extra bold tag, H1 tag, placement of keywords in the title , keyword density, alt tags, etc etc which moved you up or down

DaveN

DaveN

[Duke_of_Url]

Juanita

As already mentioned getting some quality inbound links (ie other sites linking to yours) is v v important. Next is content. Content rules by & large, and by content I mean Text, as opposed to lots of graphics.

Help the Search Engine find its way around your site via text links to the other pages, as opposed to only via clickable graphic buttons or javascript dropdown menus.

Keep the text relevant and try to build up the theme of the site (lots of threads on theming if you do a search - see Site Search at top left of screen), and where possible tailor each page <title> etc to the content of the page - Google especially likes the <title> tag.

hth

DoU