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"Search engines - how to get found by one?" Topic


12 Posts

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DemosLaserCutDesigns Fezian27 Jan 2007 4:10 p.m. PST

I have been tinkering with my sites lately and today when I tried to see if one of my sites would come up; it didn't even though I used the exact set of metatags that I entered when I made the pages. So I went to the help file and found out that most search engines don't use metatags anymore because people were putting tags that didn't relate to the subject of their page so they were more likely to show up on any search. What stank though was the help file didn't bother to tell me what to do about it. Now except for the word Metatag I dont know squat about webpages. If it weren't for Geocities easy to use pagebuilder software, I wouldn't even have a page. So anybody know what I can do to make my pages show up?

Rattlehead27 Jan 2007 6:10 p.m. PST

As I understand it, one of the largest factors involved in getting on the Google listing is actually the number of sites that link to yours.

Also, you should submit your web pages to the search engines. That way they know you're out there and can send their spiders to crawl your site.

Cincinnatus27 Jan 2007 10:08 p.m. PST

Try to use the keywords that you put in your metatags in the text of your site.

Personal logo Gungnir Supporting Member of TMP27 Jan 2007 11:53 p.m. PST

You said "lately". It can take up to six weeks before a search engine actually "sees" you.

TheMackster Fezian28 Jan 2007 2:36 a.m. PST

Seems hit or miss to me sometimes. Our Gold Dragon website showed up on a google search within 3 days of setup.

I have been told that you will show up higher in a google search list based on how frequently you update your webpage and based on trial and error I agree that "seems" to hold true for us anyways. Every time we do an update, within a few days our google search lists us higher.

Now to actually update us again as I'm way too erratic at it.

No Name0228 Jan 2007 3:32 a.m. PST

Also there are things that will prevent you from being listed. I used frames for 3 years and no listing, changed my content and BINGO.

Minondas28 Jan 2007 9:21 a.m. PST

You can completely disregard the "keyword" metatags – majority of search engines such as Google and Yahoo have stopped using them couple of years ago. "Description" and "Title" metatags are very important and one should consider very carefully their content, especially in regard of text on main page.

Also, especially if you are using frames, it is very important to have a "no frames" page with complete sitemap that contains direct links to all pages on your site. Google and Yahoo have special web owner programs where you can register your site and uppload corresponding sitemap files. Google mapsite files are a tad fiddly but there are free online tools that can generate them for you.

Generally it's not an exact science – I managed to put company website that I'm responsible for into top 5 positions on Google and Yahoo, but my private webpage is completely ignored my all search engines except MSN.

TheMackster Fezian28 Jan 2007 3:46 p.m. PST

Hey, one thing I did on our page based on a frinedly webmasters suggestion was to add a ton of keywords to the bottom of the page for searchbots and such to find for indexing our content.
ex/
minis- 28mm mini, 28mm figures, 15mm mini, 15mm figures, 1/72 mini, 1/72 figures
rules- warzone, etc.
manufacturers- wizkids, days of wonder, etc.

I added about 4-5 paragraphs like this to the bottom of our main page (no frame) and put them in 6pt font same colour as our background (aka invisible). Seemed to work great for us as we're pretty easy to find on a search now.

Minondas29 Jan 2007 12:24 p.m. PST

Mackster, a word of warning about context text in same color as background – it is considered as spamming by certain search engines and can get your URL banned at for example Google.

cosmo197430 Jan 2007 6:42 a.m. PST

Create a sitemap page with links to all of your pages – that'll make it easier for the spiders to find and index your pages.

Use semantically-structured pages – i.e. A keyword-laden (but appropriate) h1 tag, with nested h2/h3/h4 and p tags

Identify keywords specific to each important page, and make sure that these keywords appear in that page's title, description, and mark-up

And use the google webmaster tools to add your site and sitemap to google, and monitor it's performance (http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/webmasters/) – Yahoo has a similar webmaster tool

madaxeman13 Feb 2007 9:18 a.m. PST

Adding alt text tags to pictures is also a good way to increase the keyword density on any page, and also means you get picked up by image searches on google, which I woudl hazard a guess wargamers are fairly likley to use.

But at the end of the day it does come down to deciding what your focus is and then having lots of highly relevant, highly specific text on a page that is also good enough for lots of other people to link to. There are lots of sites about "Wargames" but relatively few about "Vallejo Paint Codes for 7YW Austrian Hat Feather Dyes"….

tim
madaxeman.com
(which has managed to pretty much top most searches for terms related to 10mm WW2 stuff, which I am still highly chuffed about)

cosmo197416 Feb 2007 2:44 p.m. PST

To be honest madaxeman, the ALT image text really doesn't contribute to SEO – it's there to provide a textual alternative to visually-impaired users when using a screenreader program.

But yeah – theme-specific pages with in-links and theme-oriented/keyword-laden semantic text are all good.

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