[ARENA]

Simple basic question:
How do i get a site to appear in the most used search engines?

I know i have to add some meta tags in the head of my site, but what else do i need to do?
Send single emails to every search engine i want my site to appear?

Or is there any webpage i can go to fulfill the the subscription to the common engines?

I'd appreciate a hint on this.

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by ARENA:
<STRONG>Simple basic question:
How do i get a site to appear in the most used search engines?

I know i have to add some meta tags in the head of my site, but what else do i need to do?
Send single emails to every search engine i want my site to appear?

Or is there any webpage i can go to fulfill the the subscription to the common engines?

I'd appreciate a hint on this.</STRONG>

Well, you could try the $$$ versions online, whereby you splash a lot of cash up front and people supposedly submit your site to the major search engines for you.

But I wouldn't bother. Do it the hard, cheap way instead. That way you get the most satisfaction and you know the job was done right. Contact each search engine - or use the 'suggest a site' feature - and fill out each form one-by-one. Once you get yourself noticed on these big search sites, it's only a matter of time before your entries get cross-referenced by every other search engine on the web.

I know when I registered PeptoLab, it took about 4-5 days to come up on Yahoo, and I even had a personalised email to let me know it was ready.

Just make sure you SPECIFICALLY categorise your site and customise it for each search engine to make sure it appears in the category you want it to appear in. You can also have a quick nose-around to see if some closely-related categories have less entries - that way you stand a much better chance of getting a top rating.

Keep the description and keywords meta tags consistent in all your site, refine the words you use in them - and make sure the same words actually appear in the body of each page to ensure better search results - and ensure the 'robot index / follow' tags are set.

Have I forgotten anything?

Oh yeah, buy yourself a 6 pack and spend one whole night doing about 10 search engines and some research. Do it once and you're set!

Cheers

[ARENA]

Thanks Simon. One more thing, is it necessary to include the meta tags for the search engines in every page of my site or just the index.html would work?
It would be a pain to add such tags to every single .html page now.

[Simon Mundy]

Originally posted by ARENA:
<STRONG>Thanks Simon. One more thing, is it necessary to include the meta tags for the search engines in every page of my site or just the index.html would work?
It would be a pain to add such tags to every single .html page now.</STRONG>

It's not necessary, but it's a good way to make sure any text within your site stands a good chance of being indexed ( == better ranking on search results!)

I think even BBEdit lite could do a search and replace over multiple files to insert the &lt;Meta&gt; tags into the pages which are currently lacking. Then a painful task all of a sudden becomes very easy.

[train]

Submitting to the engines individually is better, but if you want quick and dirty automatic site submission, you can use free sites such as www.jimtools.com. There are also a few apps out there that automate this process.