Get Your Site Indexed

Someone just asked me “How do I get my site listed on Yahoo and All The Web?”

My Answer:

To get listed on Yahoo & ATW - um, submit your site

All The Web (ATW) is driven by Yahoo. I find it easier to find the links to get your site submitted by going to alltheweb.com and clicking on the Submit Site link at the bottom - then following it through to the Yahoo Free Link submission page.

1. You have to be registered as a Yahoo user.
2. You can submit your RSS feed or sitemap at the same time.

Little tips:

1. Be ready for the spider when it comes crawling - don’t have any ‘under construction’ or ‘coming soon’ or stuff like that.
2. Go find a site that is listed on either ATW or Yahoo and either post in their forum or make a relevant comment - don’t go posting spam!
3. If you do post something on someone elses site - make sure your link to your site is in your signature
4. If you like a post on a site - don’t just comment it - add value - Post something interesting on your site then link back to it on their site.

Hope that helps

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

First off, what is DMOZ?

The official description:

“The Open Directory Project is the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web. It is constructed and maintained by a vast, global community of volunteer editors.”

Basically where sites such as Google send a robot (spider) to systematically index (crawl) your site on a regular (or not so regular in some cases) basis - the ODP is different - It is totally dependent on its editors.

This is what happens:

You submit your site (URL, Description, Contact details) into a submission form - first you have to surf to a category that you think your site belongs. Each category has an editor who will check your submission for errors and omissions. They’ll pop over to your site to make sure you’re not submitting a site that has no relevance to their category. If all goes well they’ll approve the submission and your site should show up in the next update of the directory.

As DMOZ is loved by the search engines, you should get a backlink from them within 2 weeks to a couple of months.

Why does DMOZ have editors?

If they didn’t have editors the directory would be useless and full of spammy sites like most of the FFA (free for all) directories out there.

Put it this way - If you had a directory would you let people post just anything where they wanted? No, I guess you wouldn’t. DMOZ editors make an excellent contribution to the Internet as a whole - If you want to find an authority website on a subject - DMOZ is the place to go. Categorized, sensible listings, relevant and up to date.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that paying $50+ to lots of these new directories is a good deal, IMHO it isn’t. Most of them operate on the ‘Pump and Dump’ principle - Pump the directory full of links (making money along the way) - then Dump the directory by just leaving it to rot or by selling it, domain and all, to the highest bidder. Caveat emptor - buyer beware!

Just because DMOZ is free and sometimes can be difficult to get listed on - don’t be fooled into overlooking it’s true value in getting your site indexed. Most of the search engines use the fact that you’ve been listed by a human on DMOZ to establish your links worth - you’ll get a higher PR (page ranking). Oh by the way - DMOZ is old! It has stood the test of time - Highly revered and loved (and hated) by almost anyone who knows anything about the Internet.

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

Someone recently asked me - “Please look at my blog site - does it have a nice design?” I said yes it does, why do you ask?

He was concerned that the only people who come to his site repeatedly are the ones he either gives the link to (in an IM) or after he’s commented on their site. Here is my take on it…

Let’s say I can’t see the site, I would say that design isn’t really an issue with a blog - as long as it is appealing to the eye - people come to read what you’ve written not how it looks - unless you are going to have a template a day!

People say “content is king”, I disagree - you can fill your site with the same stuff other people are writing or you can come up with something unique. So “Great content is king”.

Commenting for comments basically means that you get someone type “nice blog” or “I agree” most of the time. Go find a blog that reflects/mirrors your own - something with maybe the same niche (stuff) as you have - send them an email, tell them you like their site and ask them if they want to trade stories/content/comments.

Do that with a few people in your niche and you get nice content without having to write it all yourself!

Onward and upwards

Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog)

Before you think about submitting your site to a search engine, you need to be prepared. Don’t think that because you have your domain name registered and a ‘under construction’ page up that you are ready.

Don’t even think about submitting your site to a single search engine until you are ready to receive guests or visitors. The worst thing in the world (I think so anyway) – is to follow a link to a website and only find a ‘under construction’ message or a front page with lots of links with ‘coming soon’ as a reward for my click.

Why did I come to your site? I want to either find out something interesting, look at something, download something or buy something – not to be told to come back later when you are ready – to tell the truth, I don’t think I would bother coming back. Even when you tell me to come back because I’ll remember and think “been there before, it was a waste of time, full of coming soon stuff”.

If you have a blog – don’t leave the messages saying ‘Just testing’ or ‘congratulations and welcome to your new blog’. Don’t even think about writing ‘Welcome to my blog, over the next coming few days I will be…’ Just remember, the internet has no concept of time, but humans do. If I come to your site and find a ‘Welcome to my blog…’ post with lots of promises, but you don’t deliver, why should I trust you with my time? My money? My business? The truth of the matter is, I won’t.

I’m not going to go through a whole list of things that tend to put visitors off staying on a site – but here are a few of them:

Broken links (always check your links before you upload to a site)
Awful color schemes (Yellow and Red? – Try pastel colors)
Tiny fonts – I like to be able to read without pushing my nose to the monitor.
Difficult navigation – I want consistency and clearly labelled links

That should give you a bit to think about…

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

Believe it or not, you don’t actually have to directly submit your site to a search engine. More often than not it will come and find you from links on other sites.

They find you either from links on another site (this is called ‘organic’ traffic) or a direct submission to the search engines database using an ‘add url’ link on their site. You can also use a service or a piece of software that submits you to several (or thousands) search engines at once. Please do watch out for some directories as they tend to either send you spam themselves or sell your email address to others to spam you.

What types of places are there to submit my website?
Directories (free and paid). Search Engines. Individual sites. Free For All (FFA) pages.

What is the difference between a directory and a search engine?
In simple terms:

A directory only stores links that you or someone else submits to their database.
A search engine normally follows a link that you, or someone else submits and then looks at all the other links on that page and follows them one by one until they get a list of all the pages on your site (sometimes this is called spidering or crawling, hence the terms ‘I’ve been spidered or my website has been crawled’).

Search engine spiders very rarely crawl every page of your site – they do it in batches. Depending on how ‘important’ the spider thinks your site is, depends on how deep or how many pages it will crawl.

If you have a busy site with lots of visitors and you are adding content very regularly – the spider will come visiting more often and will crawl more pages.

Getting links back to your site from your friends or forums you visit often are very good ways of getting the search engines to come spider you more often.

It is all about popularity. The more popular your site is, the more the spiders love you.

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

You need to get your web site index by the search engines so people can find you!

If you were to think of your site as a shop on the high street of your local town - People would walk past, see your displays and shop front and maybe pop in. This however is not true for the web. The way the internet is made – there is no such thing as passing trade. You can have the best site in the universe. You can have a revolutionary product which will change the way millions of people search the internet. You could have a very important message that everyone should read – but no one will come if they don’t know where it is.

To get people to visit your site, to read your message, to buy your products they need to know where to find you. People need to know your website address, your URL or be able to follow a hyper link to your site.

How do we tell people about your site? Word of mouth? Yes, this works but you can only tell so many people face to face. Should you send out an email to a list of people you recently bought from someone on the internet (10,000 email addresses for $10)? In one simple word - NO – This is the easiest way for you to lose your website, your credibility, your hosting - even your email and internet account. This is called spam.

Even though you personally may get tons of spam in your mailbox each day doesn’t mean you should do it too. It is something protected by law. Yes, you can be in serious trouble if you spam. As a rule of thumb - Only email people who have either emailed you (not spam) or someone who has personally asked you to send them information of a particular type. It would be a waste of time sending someone an email about automobiles if they are only interested in stamp collecting. I know, there could be an exception to the rule where someone could be interested in stamps with automobiles on them.

Statistically most people visit web sites by searching for them in a search engine. The funny thing is, that even if someone knows your URL or website address, they still type it into a search engine. Almost everyone has either a search engine as their homepage or they use the one provided by their internet provider and that almost always has a search box provided by a search engine.

They type your URL into the search box and press enter. If you aren’t listed in the search engine they are using, guaranteed one of your competitors will be.

Just to summarize:

You need to get your web site indexed by the search engines so people can find you!

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

1. IE Sucks. In fact its worse than that. A new post appeared on webdesignerwall.com that was very intriguing. It says to trash all IE Hacks and force Microsoft to improve its browser’s page rendering. Read more here…

2. Keep your site Clean. Don’t make it all singing all
dancing. Clean designs are best. Take mine for example. The background
is nice and dull. But the green middle and white text make up for it.
The navigation is simple and so is the logo. But take this website: http://mito.cool.ne.jp/chinari21/2-16.html its got a bad background no main content moving gifs, scrolling text and much more I cant bear it.

3. Keep it to 5 colours at the most. Most people don’t want to
see a site with millions of colours so it looks like the rainbow. So
keep it at 5 colours!

4. Have a contact page that works. The worst thing to do is not have
a way of contacting the webmaster, even if the contact page just
displays an email, its better than nothing.

5. Lorum Ipsum. This is one of the best dummy text generators
around. It displays latin text to put in templates rather than adding
your own. It is a long established fact that a reader will be
distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its
layout, this therefore means if you make a template they wont focus on
the design. Get it from here

6. Don’t use a free host. (unless you have to) Free hosts
often give you adverts, slow loading times, too much of a community
(unless you like that stuff) and addon’s you don’t need. To
be professional, you need a payed one. I recommend neoboffinhosting.
They are very good and they host my site. Remember to put psycho3000 in
the referral box to get yourself 50% more bandwidth for free.

7. Take time on designing your site. Most people wont like it if its
rushed. Make sure you post it on forums and around at home to see if
everyone likes it. Then offer a beta stage of the site with a password
protected directory where people can login and look at the design
before anyone else. This also means you can test it for compatibly with
different screen sizes if yours is to small and different browsers if
you don’t have a certain one.

8. Test, Test Test. Run your site through many tests. Check for
broken links, broken images valid coding (XHTML and CSS) check for any
error pages ect. Also run it though browsershots. This tests for many different things that may be wrong with your site.

9. Update often. Most people don’t want to see a site that
hasent been updated in a month, year ect. Keep it updated with bug
fixes, content updates, small design changes ect. Don’t think
once the site is up, you can leave it and get hits automaticly. Offer
somthing to keep the visitor on your site. (templates, codes) and make
sure to keep offering it.

10.Meta tags and SEO. Make sure you have meta tags in your site.
This picks your site up for many different things and gets it on search
engines. Use a meta tag generator for simpler implantation of the code. SEO is short for “Search Engine Optimism” Use this website to learn everything you know about SEO and more.
10 Things every website designer should know.
Written by Lewis King of psycho3000 designs

Here is a list of my favorite Google advanced search operators, operator combinations, and related uses:

• link:URL = lists other pages that link to the URL.
• related:URL = lists other pages that are related to the URL.
• site:domain.com “search term = restricts search results to the given domain.
• allinurl:WORDS = shows only pages with all search terms in the url.
• inurl:WORD = like allinurl: but filters the URL based on the first term only.
• allintitle:WORD = shows only results with terms in title.
• intitle:WORD = similar to allintitle, but only for the next word.
• cache:URL = will show the Google cached version of the URL.
• info:URL = will show a page containing links to related searches, backlinks, and pages containing the url. This is the same as typing the url into the search box.
• filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will restrict searches to that filetype
• -filetype:SOMEFILETYPE = will remove that file type from the search.
• site:www.example.com “+www.example.net” = shows you how many pages of your site are indexed by google
• allintext: = searches only within text of pages, but not in the links or page title
• allinlinks: = searches only within links, not text or title
• WordA OR WordB = search for either the word A or B
• “Word” OR “Phrase” = search exact word or phrase
• WordA -WordB = find word A but filter results that include word B
• WordA +WordB = results much contain both Word A and Word B
• ~WORD = looks up the word and its synonyms
• ~WORD -WORD = looks up only the synonyms to the word

There you go - now go find what YOU really want

This Article was written by Steve Dorrington (AKA CarpetDog). Steve regularly contributes to the Get Your Site Indexed blog. He’s also written an ebook called The 48 Hour Plan – How to get your website indexed in 48 hours or less.

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Read the rest of this entry »

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