Search Engine Listing - Platypus Websites Australia

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Listing with Search Engines

How to get found on the internet

Listing

Our price includes optimising your website for search engines and directories plus submission to any major search engines who accept free submissions.
The quickest way to get listed by search engines is being spidered from a website already listed. We provide at least one link to each of our clients to achieve that.
Generally, search engines feed off each other's databases. Some take longer than others, but eventually your website will be found by most search engines.
You may submit to many search engines or directories which have a 'Suggest a site' or 'Add URL' link on their pages.
Search engines or directories which charge for submissions don't usually give representative search results because of the charge. They are now often avoided.
Our home page now has a Google page rank of 6/10, up from 5/10 in 2004. This coincides with a large increase in visits and higher rankings in search results. Google is now listing our clients' new websites for us in less than 2 weeks. Our website seems to be spidered 3 or 4 times a week, so that any site that we link to then gets spidered quickly.

Search Engines and Directories

A search engine (e.g. Google) is a database of web pages. They extract information from your page to store in their databases. Some also run "spiders" that search the net for new pages.
A directory or index (e.g. Yahoo) is a database of web sites. Your listing in a directory depends on what they put in.
Yahoo bought Overture, the owner of Alta Vista, and is hoping to challenge Google.
Google is a public company and expanding.
Microsoft (MSN), who buys Google listings is hoping to do its own.

How long before your website is listed?

Manual submissions are can take many weeks or months to achieve listing
A link from Platypus Websites, which is spidered 3 or 4 times a week, will put new sites on the search engines' list for spidering. Then the client's home page is spidered and the inside pages are found. That can take two weeks.

Costs

Express listing is usually offered for a fee. There is no evidence that it gets you found any quicker, and fees can be ongoing.
Beware of "30 day trial" offers. One customer took this only to find that their listing was dropped after 30 days. They then had to pay more money or wait several months for a free listing.
If, when planning a website, appropriate time is allowed for the listing with search engines, then that can be done with no extra cost.

How do you get found in the first page of search results when your website is only one of many thousand sites matching a search? Put yourself in the position of the people you are trying to reach.

What key words or phrases will they enter into a search?
How many websites will these key words find?
How can their search be narrowed to include your website in the first page of results? There is no guaranteed way, but the following helps:
1. Title Tag contain those key words or 2 -3 word phrases.
2. Meta Tags contain those key words or 2 -3 word phrases (but meta tags are now ignored by the main search engines).
3. The first words in the text on your front page include those key words and phrases. (Some engines ignore Meta Tag keywords not in the text of your web page).
4. Do not 'spam' - i.e. Do not enter keywords many times, or key words not representing the content of your page. Search engines are sophisticated enough to reject websites with spam..
5. Relevance: Search engines will rank pages in order of relevance to a search criteria. The rules used in ranking pages are generally kept secret and changed often. Even after submission, a page can be dropped for no apparent reason or not even be accepted.
See Search engine rankings - What do search engines want?

Check your access log

Analysis of hits and visits to your website is provided by most hosts. If not, you can download the 'raw' log to browse.
Check trends in:
- Visits.
- Referrers.
- Search strings people are finding you by compared with the search strings you expected to be found by.
- See what countries your traffic is from.
- Is there a dominant host? Is it you?
- See Understanding your hits for some definitions.

Other ways websites are promoted

Links from other websites, portals, associations
Letterheads
Business cards
Catalogues
Shop windows
Newspaper / magazine advertising
TV / Radio advertising

Optimise your website for search engines:

Monitor your listing frequently - at least monthly, as search indexes are growing and changing rapidly. Our own website has been on the first page of Google's search results for a long time but moves between No 4 and No 8.
Follow up of rankings is therefore most important. If you have been dropped, submit it again.
Review your title tag's key words and phrases and ensure there are still matches in the displayed text on your web page.
Submit one or two pages linking to your front page.
Submit to many search engines, but take care you don't get listed by one which directs a pile of spam to you. (We received 500 emails in three days because we weren't that careful).
Fees: Many search engines have a system of charges for express listing. These still don't guarantee anything, except that once you start paying you need to continue paying to stay listed.
Pay per click schemes: These guarantee that you keep paying but not that you get business.
Perseverance and good website content will pay off in the long term.
See how a set of your keywords is found by each search engine using the boxes below. See how many listing for your keywords — 1,000 — 20,000 — 300,000 — 4 million! Most people don't look past the first 40 listings. (Hit Back button to return to this page)

Enter some key words Choose search engine
Call us for help optimising your website for search engines, if you find that it has slipped in the rankings. If we built your website, we can review your text and your tags and make submissions to a large number of search engines.