How do I get my website to appear on search engines?

mjpliv · Joined: 11 May 2004 Posts: 406 Location: Nova Scotia

In a perfect world all you would have to do is properly complete the meta tags so that they accurately reflect the contents of your website. Unfortunately we do not live in a perfect world.

In today's world wide web environment the meta tags are the next best thing to useless. This has been caused by people using whatever meta tags they want to to get hits on their sites but do not have any bearing what-so-ever on the actual contents. Now when the search sites release their web crawlers that poke around the web peeking into websites to read meta tags, they are collecting a lot of inaccurate information. It is actually possible by buy a daily listing of the most popular keywords used in search strings so they can be inserted in a website's meta tags.

You can contact the hundred or so search engines and "request" that your site be added to their index (when you use a search engine it doesn't really go out and search the web, it searches its own database - or index - of information it has collected using its web crawlers - which will be another topic of discussion). Or you can pay an organization to do all of this for you. I have found www.ineedhits.com just as effective as anybody and they have a $2.50 service that will sow the seeds of a web presence. But be carefull including any of your mainstream email addresses because these services can generate a mountain of spam.

Today better than 80% of the web searches now use the Google search engine. This search engine does not rely on meta tags to create its database. Instead it reads the first dozen or so lines of HTML on every page the webcrawlers have access to as well as harvesting all of the links it finds on the pages. It follows those links and adds the page name, description, meta tags and first few lines of HTML from the body area to the database.

Now lets say that I enter a search string like "fishing vacations". Although simplistic, this is basically how Google works. It searches its database for any reference to "fishing vacations". Every time it finds that reference it returns all of the links it previousely found on the page that contained the reference then stores them in a temporary file and continues on searching for more references to "fishing vacations". Lets say, for the sake of arguement, that Google finds 1000 references to the search string but there are 5000 links stored in the temporary file. Now Google looks at this list and finds out who's link appeared the most. Lets say www.fishingcamp.com apears in the list 600 times and the nearest competetors were www.salmonlodge.biz at 400 links and www.fishguts.au at 350 and so on and so on down through the list. What is sent to your browser is this list of links with the most "popular" one (www.fishingcamp.com) at the top of the list. This will happen even if the HTML for this site did not contain the string "fishing vacation" anywhere. But it did appear as a link on the pages that did contain the string more than anyone else. Therefore, as far as google is concerned, it is the most relevent website to the search string. This is why google always seems to be able to find what you are looking for even if you don't know exactly what to ask for.

What does this mean to you? It means get your URL listed as a link on as many other websites as possible. If you think I am kidding, try a google search using my alias "mjpliv" as a the search string. Then try my domain name "buildersmatrix" as a string. There is not much difference between the number of returns (between 300 and 400 as of today). But my buildersmatrix domain pages are full of meta tags so you would think that the "buildersmatrix" string would generate a lot more hits.