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Search Engine
Advice
How do I get listed?
Configure your pages to make sure a search engine will see you, then submit your sitemap to as many search engines as possible;
ensure you concentrate on the main ones - others will eventually
find you through these.
Submitting your site is usually a very easy procedure, some search engines demand money for listing you but I wouldn't recommend paying - it depends on your
site content though.
Above I mentioned submitting your sitemap, a sitemap is a simple page on your website which contains links to all your pages, they should be normal text links. Search engine robots will follow your links through your entire site indexing all your pages, as long as you have the necessary meta tags.
An ideal search engine meta configuration is as follows:
<head>
<title>Go Deeper... Take your Browsing Experience Further</title>
<META name="keywords" content="Go Deeper,Browsing,Inspiration,John Baldock,Bonno,Internetter">
<META name="description" content="This is a useful site which can be described in about 20 words here.">
<META name="robot" content="all">
<META name="revisit-after" content="14 days">
</head>
The title should be catchy and informative, keywords are becoming a bit more irrelevant these days - add them anyway, but bear in mind your hits will come from the words found within your page content. The description should be about 20 words long.
Make sure you add the "robot" content="all" line, this tells the search engine robots to follow your links throughout the entire site, that is also why it is best to submit your site map - the combination of that meta tag and directly submitting your sitemap means all your pages will be indexed quickly and easily.
The revisit meta tag forces the robots to come back frequently, this keeps your listing up to date.
When creating your sitemap, make sure it is not overloaded with graphics - it should be a simple page with only text links. Link to your pages using their full path on the sitemap (ie: 'http://website.lineone.net/~ jbonno/sitemap.htm', not 'sitemap.htm').
How do I ensure I get hits?
You can't be exactly sure, most of your traffic will probably come from other sites that have linked to you - there are pay options on most search engines, if you think it is worth forking out then do so.
If you follow all of the advice above then you will get hits from search engines - your ranking is also based on the popularity of your site from certain keywords.
Do not submit your site to search engines more than once, twice if you get desperate, continuous submissions will cause you to NEVER get listed.
How do I know I've had hits?
Most hosts provide stats with web space, these stats will often list the referring urls that direct traffic to your site.
If not, you can set up a monitoring service from SiteMeter or some other third party.
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