website question

Pep

I made a website for a relative's business some weeks ago.

I used appropriate keywords. Well, at least I believe so.

And I submitted the website to google, bing, yahoo. I learnt that you MUST submit it for them to find it during their searches.

Problem is, whenever I make a search for the site it never shows up on the results. Not even if I type exactly the keywords, in the order.

Someone told me it takes sometime for the "spider" of the engine to find the page, typically anything between 1 day and 1 week, so I waited patiently. But it's now several weeks and the site NEVER appear.

Any help?

Ollieda

Not sure how you "submitted" it to google. Google works as an actual search engine and will look through anything avaliable on the web, you can't actually submit it.

You are correct about submitting it to other search engines as many others are actually just searching through a user submitted database.

Have you added meta tags to you site at all? They are basically keywords but placed in the coding of your site

In very basic terms, the spiders will match keywords to your meta tags, then match your meta tags to how many times those words appear on a specific page and a relevancy rating is based on that.

It can get quite complicated, but there are many tutorials avaliable free online. It can be worth employing a SEO (search engine optimiser) for a while to get you started, but be warned they can be pricey!!!

Ollieda

Right, just double checked with google, looks like you can submit to them, but its not nessisary. Just saves a bit of time before the bots find you anyway.

Problem with optimising websites is that the way people like google work they change so regularly that you really need to be on top of things. I haven't done websites for a few years now and I'm pretty much well out of the loop!

Pep

Thanks for help.

this is how I "submitted" to google.
http://www.google.com/addurl/

No idea what "meta tags" actually are... :shock:

In fact, I'm so far from the search to be optimised, for now I would just be happy if it is returned, no matter how close to the top...

kafkathedog

Even when Google has found it it may take a few days/weeks to get indexed and appear on results.



Is it that Japanesetutor.org? If so what on earth did you use to build that? - no offence

Most of your images don't load.

You could try separating your keywords (in code) with a comma ( , )

There is an horrendous amount of code for such a sparse page.


EDIT
OK my apologies, what I thought were images were text boxes looking at the code, They dont work in all browsers just so you know.
Seem to work ok in IE but not on Firefox or Chrome

Joll

Have you added a robots.txt page to the site? I'm not a techie, but basically all the big search engines send out spiders/robots/bots to "crawl" the internet picking up information about the sites. If you have a robots.txt page then it makes the site more visible to these robots and gets your site further up in the rankings.

If you google robots.txt you should find instructions.

Other way to improve search engine optimisation is to use reciprocal links and keep updating the content.

derbygrimpeur

it takes a bit of time too. I've also done a website for a relative which is now spidered by Google hourly. The website is now found on first page when searching for some products.

Things like using <h1> <h2> <h3> tags or <strong> for certain things

This is a really useful website you may find helpful:
http://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo/

mattsaw

Ah sweet, finally a question on BR that I can answer with some authority

Right,

1. You don't need to submit to search engines, you can do, but it won't do much good.
2. Yes it can and will take some time for them to find, crawl and index your site
3. You will need to get links to your site, links are used as a means of defining 'authority' crawl depth and frequency and therefore where you rank.

Google looks at key areas on the page, so make sure you use relevent keywords on each page in the following sections,

Page title
H1 Title
Body text
Image alt attributes

Think in terms of keywords on the page and in the body text which define what you rank for, link popularity defines how high you rank. Without both you won't rank highly for ANY competitive phrases.

If you want to spend a bit more time learning about it you won't do much better than reading the SEOMoz guide - http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Cleat Eastwood

Oi vay, if I was google I'd avoid that site too. Its so browser unfriendly. If all your info is graphics no wonder its not being discovered. Google has an algorithm that will also pick out key words used repeatedly in a page. If all your text is in a jpeg it cant be detected.

and what appears correctly sized on your comp eg

http://www.japanesetutor.org/index_files/image351.gif

is massively distorted on a window bigger that 800x600

As was asked above wht did you use to build it, its massively overcoded for a couple of images and a tiled background

mattsaw

double post

Pep

Thanks guys.
Yes, that is the website.

I used Microsoft Publisher to make it. Most of what I did it was not really intentiona, just I am very computer illiterate.

mattsaw

Ouch! Yep if that is your site Google just sees masses of code.

Far too much code, not enough text, text rendered as images, HTML markup missing etc etc.

mattsaw

You *could* look at something like using Wordpress.org to create a site and then domain mapping so you can retain the use of your domain. Even thats really overkill for what you need though.

Microsoft Publisher is the devils own work when it comes to creating clean HTML

Pep

Mattsaw wrote:

Ouch! Yep if that is your site Google just sees masses of code.

Far too much code, not enough text, text rendered as images, HTML markup missing etc etc.

Ignorance makes wonder :?

One Man And His Bike

Mattsaw wrote:

You *could* look at something like using Wordpress.org to create a site and then domain mapping so you can retain the use of your domain. Even thats really overkill for what you need though.

Microsoft Publisher is the devils own work when it comes to creating clean HTML

This ^^

+

Content is King, good content will make Search Engines hump your leg and bring people in.

Write out your content carefully, don't rely on images.

Google and co will constantly change and evolve their algo's to stop people taking advantage of them and messing with the search engine system as happened for so long when you couldn't get decent search engine results because SEO "experts" were abusing the systems and hijacking rankings. So focus on your content and as the saying goes "If you build it they will come", if they stay or not is another matter.

kafkathedog

Mattsaw wrote:

You *could* look at something like using Wordpress.org to create a site and then domain mapping so you can retain the use of your domain. Even thats really overkill for what you need though.

^ +2

or try some of the other free website builders/hosts such as http://www.moonfruit.com/ not sure how search engine friendly they end up but will certainly look a hell of a lot better.

But content is as mentioned the most important thing.

Avezius

Best bet is simply to get lots of interesting content on your site!!

As some other people have suggested, META tags were depreciated in importance a long time ago for search engine ratings, so I wouldn't bother with those. 10 years ago you could spam keywords in META tags, but the crawler robots are much more advanced now.

Adding site schema's & uploading to google as per suggestions is a good idea & certainly can't hurt (I routinely do this & it's very easy). Everyone "google's it" rather than "searching for it" afterall..!!!

One last "trick" - all indexing services / web crawlers have a concept of "influence". If your website address is found linked from lots of different sources then it becomes slightly more significant. Some people add their website address to their sig in forums, etc to achieve this. It also annoys some people however!

disquieting_museeuws

A blog might be more appropriate, and much easier to do because templates, etc will be set up for you.

As said above, search engines will actually avoid websites of particularly poor quality, and this one really is a shocker - I say that with no offence intended because I've been there and done it!

Search engines like often-updated content written in coherent sentences relevant to the field you're concerned with, rather than a load of keywords just cobbled together - so a frequently updated blog about the business, and goods and services offered could do the trick, IMO, and it could even be interesting to do.