Getting listed in search engines

Some tips and suggestions for helping people find your site via search engines (Google, Yahoo, etc.)

• Meta-tags are of limited importance - use them, but don't rely on them. Use Dreamweaver's "Head" tab on the Objects toolbar for easy editing of the meta-tags. Because of so much early abuse of meta-tags, they are now largely ignored.
• Content is the key to getting listed. The search engines are designed to return quality content, so have quality content. Good web site organization is important, with descriptive links and information "chunked" to screen-sized pages. A page that discusses only "John Doe" will rank higher than a page that discusses many people. The same principle applies to any topic: one topic per page with links to related information.
• Most important: go to http://dmoz.org and click through the directory until you reach the section where your page should be listed. Submit your site there via the "Suggest URL" link at the top of the page. Write your summary description in a style to match the section where your listing will appear. A human (volunteer) editor will review your site & entry and will post as they see fit. Check back in about two weeks to see your posting...
• Go to http://www.google.com/addurl.html and submit there. Google uses the open directory ( http://dmoz.org ) data and sends out their own robots (googlebots).
• Create as many links to your site as possible. Google uses the number of links to your site as one part of the ranking (placement) criteria. More links = closer to the top of the search results (quality content makes an even bigger difference!). Contact friends and owners of similar sites and ask for a link to your site (and return the favor!).
• Most web hosts have free search engine submission services. Use them as a back-up. A few duplicate submissions won't hurt, however, overdoing it can get you kicked out of some engines. There is also very little return on your investment for this work. Also, use a "throw-away" e-mail address for such submissions, as these services are often Spammers.

Whatever you do, DO NOT PAY ANYONE to improve your search engine rankings. Any professional web developer should be able to make the site optimized for the search bots, and anyone can do the rest of the steps.

Originally published 2003-07-28