Google search... find?

the_grip on 6/10/2009 at 01:49

So I did up this website for my wife and her new stationary business. The one snag I have is actually finding a way to get google to find it. I added it to google's domains and put some shit in the meta tags in the HTML.

Since I don't want to use TTLG to advertise, let's just say the website is called (www.heyhereissomeshit.com) (which it isn't, just to be clear). If I were to search for the name of the site ("hey here is some shit"), it doesn't come up at all.

How exactly can we get the site found when the title phrase of the site (which is also the domain name) should match?

Gracias!

mudi on 6/10/2009 at 06:51

Give Google some time to find your page. It can take some amount of time between a day and a week, probably no more than a month, to find it (even if you manually submit it. Go figure).

Then there's a whole field for Search Engine Optimization, which if you do too much of Google will actually penalize you.

If there's a lot of people in the same business as you it may be very hard to get to the first page of Google.

TheOutrider on 6/10/2009 at 12:26

Also note that google (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html) ignores the KEYWORDS meta tag. I'd assume Google has a guide somewhere on what to do to make your site register with them and how to get good results, too.

Al_B on 6/10/2009 at 20:05

Don't forget the basics too.

* Make sure your pages have a sensible title (i.e. using the title HTML tag).
* Use proper structure and heading tags rather than custom styles to make headings.
* Make sure you're separating your content and structure with CSS.
* Don't use images for text and make sure that you use alt tags where you do use images (they can be empty where an image doesn't qualify for one).
* Use a text browser to view your site or, better in my opinion, firefox and the (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/60) webdeveloper plugin to turn off CSS and images. If you can still understand your website and its purpose then a search engine will stand a good chance.

These are not things that google should penalize you for - and in fact they're good practice these days anyway. Other things such as making sure you promote your site elsewhere so that search engines can find it by multiple routes can also be a big help but 'spamming' your site to link sites is definitely not a good idea.