Search Engines

Getting your site to appear on the major internet search engines is a fine art. Here are some brief tips on optimizing your site, plus you'll find some links to more detailed information.

The most important thing to remember is that your site must deserve it listing - if your site has very little content, it will be nearly impossible to get it listed.

Secondly, you must focus your content. At the centre of many search engines are keywords - the basic words that summarise your site. For HTML Central, the major keyword is of course HTML.

Your site must mention these keywords in order for the search engines to realise what your site is about. The best place to have them is in the titles of your pages, because this makes the search engines think that you're really dealing with the topics in a big way, and not just briefly mentioning them.

The more times your keywords are mentioned, the better the ranking you'll get. Note that the position of keywords is also important - those near the top are giving higher rankings than those at the bottom.

One word of warning - don't deliberately repeat your keywords dozens of times to get a better ranking. The search engines notice this form of spamming and will reject your site.

META Tags

META tags are tags which you can add to your pages to give search engines extra information. They're not as important as they used to be, but they can still be useful in some cases.

The two most important tags and DESCRIPTION and KEYWORDS. Copy the following code and paste it into your HEAD section:

<META NAME="description" CONTENT="Enter a description of your site.">

<META NAME="keywords" CONTENT="Enter keywords separated by commas.">

The description tag gives you a place to give a brief overview of the page content which will be displayed in the search engines when your site comes up. Use the keywords tag to highlight the most important keywords for the page - don't go overboard.

You can, but don't have to, use META tags on every page. The amount they'll help your site will vary between search engines and sites, but they're worth including at least on your main pages.

Keep Out!

If there are pages that you don't want listed on the search engines, create a file called "robots.txt" and place it in the root directory of your site. In it, place the following:

user-agent: *
Disallow: /file.html
Disallow: /directory/

After the initial "user-agent" business, just add the names of files and directories that you want ignored, each on a separate line preceeded by "Disallow:". You can also add the following META tag to any pages you don't want listed:

<META NAME="robots" CONTENTS="noindex, nofollow">

These measures should keep out most of the search engines.

Submitting Your Site

To submit your site to a search engine, got to the main page and look for a link which says something like "Submit a Site". You'll be asked to enter some basic details including the URL, so make sure the site is actually up and running before you submit it.

Once submitted, the search engine's computers will go and look at your site and search for keywords to help it categorise the pages. It will crawl through your links, so you don't have to submit every page.

It may take several weeks for your site to appear in the index, so be patient. Check back every so often to see if and where you're appearing. If after several weeks your site is still missing (or disappears having been listed), check that there are no obvious problems with it and try again. Search engines have been known to randomly lose sites every now and then, so it's worth making sure you don't disappear.

Yahoo!

Yahoo! is a slightly special case in that it categorises sites. You can drill down Yahoo!'s categories to find the topic you want, or just do a search on the whole lot.

If you want your site on Yahoo!, you've first got to find the category where it should be listed. Try to be as precise as possible.

Once you've found the category, click on "Suggest a Site" and type in the details requested (they ask for more than most of the engines). Your site will then be checked by a REAL PERSON (not a computer) to check that it is suitable for the category selected. If you meet the criteria (which can be quite difficult), you're site will hopefully appear in the category listing selected.

Note that because Yahoo! relies on its staff viewing sites, the process can take a long time - even months. So don't keep resubmitting your site over and over again, as all you'll do is get yourself blacklisted.

Find Out More

This is really just an quick overview of search engines. For more detailed information and tips, visit http://www.searchenginewatch.com. There's also some handy advice on search engines at http://www.atomor.demon.co.uk.