How to Make Sure Your New Web Site is Found by Search Engines

The best site in the world won't do you any good if nobody can find you. Here are some steps you can take to show up on search engines.

Instructions

1




Title Each Page to Coincide with Your Domain.
If you use MS Publisher to do a simple web page, you won't automatically insert a title when the document converts to Hyper Text Markup Language, HTML. To check, preview your document as a web page, right click, view source and look between the HTML tags for title i.e.

You'll have to insert the title manually and then save it before uploading. In Dreamweaver, you can enter a title directly. You can use the same title on every page in your site. Each page will be saved as a file with a distinctive name and uploaded that way.

2

Add a text head in bold or large type to each web page with your site name.
That will give you three anchors for search engines to latch onto, your domain, title and a headline for each page.

3

Sprinkle search terms throughout your text.
In the early days of the Internet, one adult site sought to increase its search engine rankings by filling a page with the word sex, like this "sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex" up and down the site's home page. So that it didn't look strange, the webmaster chose a font in the same color as the background.

Search engines have become more sophisticated today. Repeating a term ad nauseum is now counterproductive. Too much repetition will result in your losing search ranking. Still, it's very useful to compile a list of key words appropriate for your business and incorporate the terms into your web copy.

4

Take advantage of free listings.
A good place to start is the open directory project which is a web directory of Internet resources. You can think of it as a reference library. Go to http://dmoz.org and click on "Suggest URL" to add your site. Sites that incorporate open directory data into their searches include AOL Search, Google, Netscape Search, and Yahoo Search.

At Google, you can register as a webmaster and submit your site for inclusion in the company's searches. There is no guarantee that Google will crawl your site, but the foremost search engine company will eventually get around to it. Also, there are useful webmaster tools Google provides you for free. When your site is finally crawled, you'll get a site profile including dead links.