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John T.
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Could kick myself in the butt - 7/2/2003 23:03:52
I recently finished my second site. The first site is slightly over 2 years. Now without ever paying anything for search engine submission, about 3 months or so back, I was averaging about 25 visitors a day combined Yahoo and Google. About 40 totalled from SE. I was so busy trying to get this other site finished, I didn' t really pay close attention to site traffic. For some reason, my Google and Yahoo SE hits are gone. Now one thing I did notice is that when I checked my link pages, about 75% of those on my pages did not have me on their pages. Shame on them. But I know now that you need to keep up with that. In fact, I am guessing there is a way to do a search without having to physically go to a site and find if you are there?
Anyway, I just spent 300 bucks to have this second guy listed with Yahoo. I have been reading some on it seemed like the thing to do. Anyone with any other suggestions for somebody with really limited resources for this to proceed? Thank you very much.
John
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rumblepup
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/4/2003 0:59:19
Keep the 300 bucks next time, and spend your valuable time optimizing for the SE' s.
You do not have to pay Yahoo to be included on their web searches. (stinks to find out too late huh?)
Yahoo uses the Google database to populate it' s web search. Now, Yahoo does have it' s own directory, and that is crawled by their own spider. But here' s a way around that. If you know a website that is already listed in the Yahoo directory, and you can get your site listed on that page, you will be crawled and (hopefully) added to the Yahoo directory.
In fact, a bunch of portals and search engines use the Google database. And guess what Google uses for it' s database. DMOZ! And DMOZ is free! AOL uses dmoz too, and I think most of the SE' s and directories dip into that database as well.
Now, Google does spider your site and checks it for :
popularity - how many websites point to yours
key words - they check the keywords against your content, to make sure you ain' t lying. it does not base position on keywords, just checks for relevance.
CONTENT - your content MUST be relevant to the search
img ALT tags - Got an inside tip that it is still on their spider' s check list. Not a big priority to search results, but everything helps.
URL - if a search term or keyword exists in your url, better placement.
Popularity, it seems, is very important. And popularity is not just described as being on, let' s say, a magazine article or a industry directory. It also corresponds to SE listings, as well as other web sites.
Here' s a neat trick to gain some " virtual" popularity.
Make all of your main links on your website absolute links instead of relative links.
In other words, when you create a hyperlink, instead of pointing the link to _home.htm, point the link to www.website.com/home.htm. Do that for all your main navigation. (if your using includes like a good little designer, you only have to alter one page)
Yeah, it sounds dumb. Your telling the hyperlink to go out of the website and then come back in at such and such point, but Google, aha, sees that as links pointing to various places in your web.
Last I heard, they haven' t refined the process for self referencing links, so it helps. When they refine that process, I still think it will help to use absolute links.
DMOZ. Again, Very important.
Listing with actual directories, or accepted FFA' s (Free For All) helps.
And then, there is submitter.net
If your designed your website right, you only need to submit one page, because that page will direct bots to the other pages in your web.
Go to submitter.net
Pay 50 bucks
submitter.net posts to the big 6, as well as about 1400 smaller search engines, directories, and accepted FFA' s. Every month for a year. Just the act of submitting does not help your site, you have to pay attention to all of the inner workings that I meantioned before, thus my reference to correct design.
It works.
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Mojo
Posts: 2431
From: Chicago
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/4/2003 21:23:11
Good post. Although, don' t get too worked up about DMOZ. Google does have a feed from DMOZ, but it is not their database. Google has databases with their own content.
I have 6 sites. Not one is in DMOZ. I tried, failed, gave them the finger and have never looked back. Many, many SEO pros are doing the same.
Oh, I failed to mention. Without DMOZ I am well indexed in Google, MSN, ATW, Yahoo and bunches of little search engines and directories that flat don' t matter.
If your looking to increase conversion rate ($$) you would do far better to spend your time learning about ad copy writing then even 1 minute with DMOZ.
quote:
CONTENT - your content MUST be relevant to the search
That is only true if you don' t have a ton of backlinks. Search engine spam also works. If your in a highly competitive market the SE spammers are usually making up the top 20 listings in Google.
MSN loves certain spam.
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DaAngel
Posts: 300
Joined: 3/30/2003
From: Posting Machine - Belfast Child
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/5/2003 5:08:31
Starting out, DMOZ can help in a provinical manner. This is beacuse some sate and country based sites derive their search results from DMOZ.
Thus the links that these sites show also count in the google page rank as incomming links.
< Message edited by DaAngel -- 7/5/2003 5:11:16 AM >
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John T.
Posts: 39
Joined: 1/22/2003
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/6/2003 23:54:20
I want to thank you sincerely for the great, lengthy information. Yes it hurts to know the 300 was not well-spent. I panicked. But you live and learn. I will digest this information and hope I can accomplish about half of what you can. I did by the way get both sites listed with dmoz.
Once again, I am very grateful.
John
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John T.
Posts: 39
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/7/2003 7:33:45
I think I may have a problem that I didn' t realize until just now. After goint to submitter.net and seeing how to place the meta tags, it dawned on me.
One of my sites is MySite.com. It has a message board on it. Earthlink was my host until just recently and couldn' t handle the cgi scripts being written. So I found another host. Who, coincidentally, had made my message board to begin with. They now offer hosting that gives you a message board as part of the plan. So this is what I did.
Without thinking about search engine traffic, I had just my message board transferred to the new host. New domain for it. MySiteForums.com. This allowed my active board to stay up(it was only down a few hours to transfer the data from the old board to the new board). Then I moved the non-board part of MySite.com to a new host that supports asp.net(I redid the thing in asp.net) and the board' s host does not support asp.net.
So what I have now is this. Two domains for 1 site. MySite.com and MySiteForums.com. Problem I think I may have is this. 80 to 85 percent of my traffic will be at MySiteForums.com. But how are search engines going to find a site that is totally message board pages? This may be a dumb question but I had to ask it. Is there a way without changing the domain name for the board to get search engines to find it? I was wondering if some kind of redirect from MySiteForums.com to MySite.com would work.
Anyway, thanks for any help. What a mess now.
John
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John T.
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/7/2003 15:02:03
Thanks again. Guess what I am afraid of is submitting this forum url and missing out on search engines. Especially if the message board is producting many views, visits.
Thanks again.
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John T.
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/18/2003 23:32:39
I used your recommendation several weeks ago and went with submitter.net. So far, I have seen absolutely no increase in search engine trafffic. Or any traffic, really. For three separate domains. Perhaps it is too soon. But I did email their support simply asking whether I followed everything I was supposed to do. That has been days without a response. This could still work out and I hope it does. But I have a bad feeling.
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rumblepup
Posts: 116
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/19/2003 1:38:49
John-T
couple of questions.
Did you get the report back from submitter.net?
If you did, you where submitted.
Second.
A couple of weeks is not enough time to see results on search engines.
sometimes it takes a month or two.
Believe me, I know.
It doesn' t hurt to follow up, though. You gotta have a little patience.
You can always go to addme.com and use their free service if your feeling antsy, but guess what addme.com uses? You guessed it, submitter.net.
Did you use submitter' s online meta tool?
It helps too.
another way to check if your site is submitted is to do a dry search for it.
like this mysitecom, or mysite. Don' t include .com,.net or .org. Just the url of your site. In other words, no dots.
Calm down. There is no possible way to guarantee any kind of listing on the net at all, but submitter is a great tool to get us as much as possible.
You should see SE placement in about 3 months total. Start working on getting links from like minded websites, and share links back with them. Start getting involved in the media, and put out press releases, They really help too.
< Message edited by rumblepup -- 7/19/2003 1:45:33 AM >
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John T.
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 7/20/2003 1:09:18
Thanks very much. Yes, I did get a report back, by the way. I appreciate your input, rp.
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Mick Dugan
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Joined: 7/26/2003
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RE: Could kick myself in the butt - 8/18/2003 19:10:46
Re the fact that google likes to see other sites linking to mine to issue a better rating, does the fact that I include my url at the bottom of my posts carry the same weight as if I'm listed in someones links page?
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