After many months, nearly a year of on again/off again work, I have 155 pages done, merchant account in effect, everything functional and think it's time to starting submitting to search engines.

I have a stack of papers here on the different search engines, and have been reading tutorials and all the info can be a bit overwhelming. So, since business/marketing is no longer here, I thought I would ask one final time for a check and hopefully, this weekend will be a "memorial" one for me, as I plan to start submitting. (that is,if you guys don't find too many things I need to revise).

So bear with me on the questions. May seem trivial to some, but a BIG step for me!

1.
So many sites list all the major search engines and include alta vista and yahoo on the list. But which are (besides yahoo) the indexes that one should submit to once and *only* once? And if one doesn't receive confirmation back in a month or two, I have read that one should submit every month, whether it needs it or not. Even after your site is listed????

2. I have been reading and considering selfpromotion.com. Do you agree that one should pick the top 12 or 14 to do by hand? And of the others, what is a fair price for this site's service? (hey, you don't know if you don't ask). $10 is too cheap for a commericial site but what - $50-$100? I still have yahoo, inktomi, go.to, to pay for (and maybe more I haven't been to yet).

3.
I got a promotional email the other day for a 170 page book that is supposed to teach me about SE sumbmission. But I would rather save the $100 towards the yahoo submission. One part that caught my eye was this, and I quote:

> Are you aware that...>
> ...several engines work from a single submission
> index but submitting to that index will get your
> page penalized?>
> Yes, you read that right ...submitting your page to
> this VERY popular (and critically important) index
> will get your page penalized.>
> The solution lies in submitting through one of their
> side doors and when you do so, your page
> automatically receives ongoing 'preferred VIP'> treatment.>
end quote.

Can anyone expand on this and clarify what I could be doing wrong in a day or two and which index they are referring to?

4.
I am concerned that I have just keywords rather than key phrases. If I change page content, and then keywords to reflect key phrases a bit later one, then can I resubmit later? And what about yahoo and the others that one should submit to only once?

5. I have viewed page sources and can suspect the ones that were hand coded and not created by a wysiwyg editor. Their code looks a lot! different than mine. Point being: my preload and mouseovers are still sluggish in i.e. Surprisingly, they are instant in n.n. I apologize for all the nn bashing I have privately done for that fact alone. Is there a better or more efficient way of doing it than what I have done? And again, can I resubmit based on those kinds of changes?

And finally:
6. Is this site ready? Have I crossed most of the t's and dotted most of the i's?

I apologize for being so long winded. Now comes the biting fingernails part while I wait for responses and actually start the submission process.

Thanks so much for your time and all the tremendous help that you folks have been in these last months. It never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, EVER would have gotten this far without your help!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maria
www.themeanderingpath.com

quote:

---

Originally posted by CavalierLady:

And finally:
Is this site ready? Have I crossed most of the t's and dotted most of the i's?

---

Great job, really a nice looking site. Only thing I noticed is the home page is very slow to load.I don't think I would have waited if I was "surfing". I think it's the top banner that is so slow.

Again, I love the look and think you have done a great job here...

------------------
Gil Harvey
The Host Factory
Resellers are our speciality
"Is there another word for synonym?"

I rememeber saying this a while back but I still get white space between the top left corner and the main top banner bit - there is also a slight white line below the top left corner - otherwise the site looks great and is easy to get around.

As for search engine stuff, I think your title could be improved - along the lines of your description, this is what will appear in Altavista so the keywords here are important as well as a description that's going to appeal to people. Some of your keyword phrases might need a change - I'd go for the what you've got in your text and get rid of others like "awards" and "books". There are some images that don't have alt information - significantly your top left corner.

I think it's getting more important these days to get a good description in www.dmoz.org - as it's free and a lot of sites are using their listings - google also seems to be increasing in popularity (they also use dmoz for their directory listings).

I do all submissions by hand - I've tried the automated way, submissions to 1500 or 5000 search engines, and I honestly believe it's a waste of time and a con. Your 3rd point seems a bit strange to me - I don't think there's any harm in resubmitting your site to search engines every six weeks or so when your content changes, for directories, there's no point if you already have a listing.

You have some meta tags that really have no particular use, they're not going to cause any problems - maybe lines like
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 4.0">
<meta name="ProgId" content="FrontPage.Editor.Document">
are superfluous.

I also find MSIE sluggish for preloaded images, but I think it's a bug issue rather than the code or MSIE in general - I'm not sure.

Looks like the site is about ready to go live but I think a couple of the above points need tidying up first.

Best of luck with it.

Cheers
Andy

------------------
Internet Business Solutions S.L. (Spain)
Dreamweaver Users Forum

Ignore all promotional emails (ie. spam) regarding search engine positioning. Their job is to line the pockets of the promoter, not to help you. The "important information" on this one is most likely some little tidbit of info that is not the "be all, end all" they make it out to be. They could be refering to the well known fact that Canada.com is a great side-route into Inktomi, but last week when I checked there the option to submit your url was gone. I've also heard it's better not to submit directly to AltaVista (one method given was to get a link on a site that is already listed there), others say it's fine to submit to them. Partnerships and feeds from different search engines and directories are constantly changing. Overall, do not worry about this. Gaining ranking and popularity takes time and patience.

One thing I'll stress again... the descriptions on your home page should be links. It will pull people into your site quicker and search engines like keywords that are linked like that.

I still find it confusing to have both the "browsing" area and a separate "store" area. In the store, can you put a longer description in instead of just the name of the item? I think you'd increase your sales instead of having the two sections with basically the same info.

With the dmoz.org... besides submitting your site to the correct category write up some short articles about gardening, garden planning or decorating, birdhouses, etc. and submit them individually to other pertinent categories. They really could be anything... but something that will interest your viewers... bringing people in, keeping them around a while, and getting them to bookmark and come back.

The awards are fun, but a testimonial page would do more to help sales.

One final note, from the pages within the store you should have a link back to your home page.

When you get ready to do your Yahoo submission, feel free to post it here (category/description) if you'd like any advice on it.

Linda

I am in the process of changing title and description now. Never would have caught the top left image with no alt description. Thanks, Andy. Load time and images?? -well, I have optimized as much as I can and still have images look like something. Perhaps one day soon I can get a better graphics program to solve the white line problem.

Yes, I have seen the Canada.com info. I was just wondering what tips they might have been referring to, since, as you said, things are always changing. Like I said, I will save the money for the yahoo submission.

I am not quite clear on what you mean by descriptions on home page needing to be links. Images in the center of the page are clickable with alt text reading: click here to go to this department. Could you clarify?

I will work on the store section. It seems that others hosting with this same host have this type of message, and I have seen it once somewhere else, tho I don't recall where now, that the site and the store are pretty much separate. Talked with a couple others on the phone and they have not had any problems with it, and appear to be very successful. It just seems to save any future frustation if it is pointed out ahead of time to visitors. I will discuss with host any options.

I just finished some articles, like you mentioned. They do not, as yet, link from the home page. Only from the main birdhouse page. I can add a link at the bottom of the home page as more articles are created. I would have to restructure the side navigation rather than add more buttons, which would slow the page load even more.

Submit individually?? Um...showing ignorance here, but I thought it was the custom to only submit only the home page, as the spiders would eventually find all the other pages. This would be a part of the monthly or bimonthly process - to submit different sections of one's site??

Testimonials - yes, great idea ... if and when I get some. (awards - hey, it was the first one. What else could I do? (embarrassed and blushing) I never thought I had a chance - first site and all.)

Like the idea about linking back to home page from within store. Thanks. Time consuming but may be worth the effort.

Have yet to work on yahoo submission. Thanks so much to all of you for your time. Hope you are having a pleasant Memorial Day weekend.

Maria

(I looked at it under opera btw - so now you know that it works in opera too :-) )

The nav bar doesn't seem to work on this page:

http://www.themeanderingpath.com/small%20pond%20part%203.htm

The Headings on the Nav bar are a little hard to read but that's compensated for by how beautifully clear the actual link buttons are. - I wouldn't lose a lot of time on this, perhaps file it under the heading of "things that are put on the long finger." :-)

Home page: A bit slow - but you already know about that :-)

The white space etc you know about.

Key words etc:

I suggest that you go here:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com

Select some links at random and view the source you'll quickly see how good metatags can be done. (Not that there's anything wrong with yours btw - but they could be punched up a little)

Also on the htmlgoodies site there are pages on metatags and search engines here's the direct link:

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/register.html

On that page theres a link to a superb metatags tutorial also - do please check that one out.

Finally here's my cheat's way of picking words and phrases when I get stuck.

I use a free text editor called notetablight you can get it here:

http://www.notetab.com

I select the HTML libray

Next I paste in the entire source for a page into it

Then I select everything and select Strip HTML tags from the modify menu.

Finally I go into tools and selct the text statistics tool

You'll get a list organised like this:

Word Frequency %

Different words/items counted: 58
Total Words: 89
Total Punctuation: 11
Total Other Text: 5
Total Characters: 582
Total Paragraphs: 1

I right click to copy the list and go down through words for example

goldfish =
family =
pond =
hobby =
project =

This all sounds like a heap of work but it isn't and it does help me get my thoughts together on which words/phrases to use.

The autosummarise feature in word does something similar btw.

A last point. I *enjoyed* visting your site and would like to compliment you on how you use language throughout it. I came away with an impression of a warm and friendly firm that, were I in your part of the world, I'd like to visit and buy stuff - simply because it was a human firm. No cold corporatespeak and no hard sell.

Thanks for that - I sometimes don't enjoy visiting sites for critiquing - your i definitely did.

kind regards

mark

------------------
Hope this helps :-)
Gorilla
aka Mark Saunders
http://www.computerdriving.com

marksaunders@techie.com

And thank you for taking the time it took to write such a long response. I appreciate the links. I will definitely check them out. I realize my keywords consist of too many words, not enough phrases. I have been at a bit of a loss there, for I wrote the pages first, then picked out the keywords, rather than someone designing a page around keywords, keywords, keywords.

I was able to get the navigation bar to work on the page you mentioned. I will try it on a different computer later and see if it still works.

And thank you for your kind words. We try to be "down-home" regular kind of people in all our dealings. My husband is a true southerner all the way. He has built and installed guardrails down the front steps for elderly ladies and only charged them a pound of coffee. The other day he could see that a fellow was down and out and didn't have much money, and when he was asked how much it would cost to repair a certain part, my husband told him it might cost him a watermelon (he looks forward to summer, not for the hot weather - for the watermelons). The fellow brought one by and came to my office to see what the real charges were, as my husband was gone at the moment, and I told him if he did bring a watermelon, then the job was paid for. He couldn't believe it and said he would certainly be recommending our other family owned business very highly. So I hope that general attitude is reflected.

I hope to polish it up and bit, and thanks again.

Maria

For the links on the descriptions on the home page, I meant highlighting the text and link it to the same page as the image is linked to. Redundant, but most people see underlined words as something to click on quicker than graphics and the search engines will give a little more weight to keywords that are hyperlinked.

Some search engines/directories will allow individual pages to be submitted, others only take the index page. Open Directory (dmoz.org) will sometimes take articles as individual pages if they are very pertinent to that category and the site isn't the same category or a category directly above it.

For testimonials, ask for them. I'm sure you'll get some wonderful ones. Contact the customers you've already had (including local ones) and ask them if they'd mind giving a recommendation. For future orders, you might enclose a postcard or letter for the customer to return if they're willing to recommend your business.

Linda

[This message has been edited by LB (edited 05-29-2001).]

Great idea about the testimonials. I am already working on fliers to send to customers, but that is a great idea about the recommendations. Thanks!!!

hmm...yes, redundant, and not particularly appealing, but...if it is appealing to the search engines, well, allright - I'll put links on the text as well as the images.

One question please:
I have these lists pulled up, top 100 search engines, etc. But:

Should I submit to, for example, metagopher.com, since they use hotbot, go,alta vista, etc. There are lots of multi-search engine sites around, and does it help? Is is redundant, - or if one doesn't get in alta vista or yahoo, would it actually help?

Thanks for all the help and suggestions. I sure do appreciate it.

Maria

When looking for one's listing, I saw one reference somewhere to type in domain:yourwebsitetitle in the search bar.

Is that the correct way to see your ranking, rather than searching for www.yourwebsite.com?

I got my first confirmation! Looksmart.(altho it will take a few days to appear, and some weeks for excite, alta vista, etc.)

YIPPPPPPPEEEEEEEEE!!

Maria

First, the page that had the problem with the navigation bar. You have spaces in your file name which is why it says %20 You need to change that to an underline. I didn't check all your pages but of the ones I checked that was the only one.

For the ones I don't do by hand, I have used selfpromotion.com with very good results. As of the last time I looked, there were some extras if you donated $ 20.00, but you gained nothing for more. I have always gone with $ 20.00 and they seem happy with that.

There are a lot of ins and outs of things and the only thing I have read that ties into the backdoor thing you asked for is that several of the sites are tying into GOTO's paid listings, and if you bid for a top spot it will also get you a higher listing in several other search engines than if you list with them directly.

Once you get your site listed with the search engines you can check and see where you are getting good results and where you are not. You can then go to http://searchengineforums.com They have a popular forum with a section for each search engine so if you are getting poor results with Excite for example there is a whole forum discussing how to get better rankings with Excite. Another good forum on search engines is www.gethighforums.com I don't get it, but I think there is a good newsletter on search engines at www.searchenginewatch.com Well that is all I have for now. Hope you have the great results you want with your site Maria

------------------
If you are going to think anyway, you might as well think BIG

Thanks for your kind words also :-) - what you said about your husband and yourself sparked off a thought.

Have you considered doing a few pages that are optimised for people who are visually impaired and use screen readers and having a link to them from your start page or at the start page of every path down which your visitors will meander?

You'd be *amazed* at how easy it is to do :-) and how it can drive traffic to your site.

Now I'm *not* suggesting that you up and redo everything by any stretch of the imagination. (I might suggest it if the good lord had seen fit to provide us with 48 hour long days and the ability to be in three places working hard and perfectly simultaneously ... but he didn't ... and every heartfelt prayer I utter that the universe be re-arranged in this way gets answered with silence so ... *g* )

What I *am* suggesting is that as you already give a good and ethically run/based service that you have a think about ways of letting people with special needs know about it.

If you're interested and have any spare time (interesting concept that - hmm - "spare time" I wonder what it means.) Here's a few links to get started

for a good overview and a wonderful set of links start here:

http://html.about.com/compute/html/cs/accessibility/index.htm

(By the way the about guide for this topic pleads with people to let her know when you do such pages and recommends such sites to visitors.)

Microsoft have some fabulous stuff too, start with these:

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/dev/web/checklist.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/dev/web/HTML.htm

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/dev/web/resources.htm

and here's the link to their resources page :-)

http://www.microsoft.com/enable/dev/web/resources.htm

Not to be out-done IBM have also some great stuff - I love their checklist:

http://www-3.ibm.com/able/accessweb.html

Kind regards,
Mark

ps: check out bobby especially.

------------------
Hope this helps :-)
Gorilla
aka Mark Saunders
http://www.computerdriving.com

marksaunders@techie.com

Thanks again.

Maria

Have emailed you with link to extremely good metatag generator.

http://www.tafweb.com/

Mark

------------------
Hope this helps :-)
Gorilla
aka Mark Saunders
http://www.computerdriving.com

marksaunders@techie.com