A few days ago I submitted my new site to google for indexing. Before submitting I ensured that:


1. Title containts the relevant keyword - Free Classifieds
2. Meta Description also contains the the relevant keywords.
3. Meta Keywords has a small array of relevant keywords.
4. Body of home page, has a couple of relevant keyword occurances.

When I now search for my site in google with my domain, it shows up. However, when I search by any of the keywords that i had used as stated above, my site just doesn't show up. To confirm this I searched all the 70-odd pages to see if my site is shown anywhere but to no use.
My questions are:

1. Is there a way i can know by what keyword my site could have been indexed by, apart from my site name?

2. Does the fact that my site won't show up with the attached keywords, mean that it is unlikey that those keywords would ever fetch my site in the results?

Will appreciate your comments! Thanks

you can use keyword ranking tools to check your keyword position for your site.

stats program like awstats gives you a list of keywords which was used to bring in visitors.

and you can also use Google Analytics to see some advanced reports.

i do however doubt that with your keyword "free classifieds" you will have a lot of results immediately.

a search on overture shows the below approx search numbers per month.
21529 free classifieds

also

submitted my new site to google

you dont have to submit your site to any Search engines.

they will find by your backlinks.

Get relevant links from various other sites and be patient.

Originally Posted by StickNoBills

Is there a way i can know by what keyword my site could have been indexed by, apart from my site name?

Pages don't get indexed like that - every word/combination of words on your page is a potential 'keyword', whether you are targeting that keyword or not.

There are a number of reasons why your pages might not be ranking well - age of site (too young?), lack of backlinks with "Free Classifieds" in the anchor text etc.

Also, you are competing with around 765,000 other pages that are also targeting this phrase (as a rough estimate), many of them well established, so it's not surprising that your pages currently rank so low. Could you choose other phrases to target as well (preferably low competition, high number of searches)?

Just as has been said above. Your pages aren't indexed by keyword. You most likely show up for your domain name since it's unique and there's not a lot of competition. Free classifieds on the other hand is going to be very competitive and it will take a lot of work before your pages rank well for the term.

I've written an seo basics tutorial which I think you may find useful and there is also good information here and at other forums that can help give you a better understanding of how search engines and search engine optimization works.

Thanks for the inputs!

vangogh, your tutorial on SEO is quite informative.

Thanks. I tried and hope it's helpful for people new to a lot of this stuff. Always nice to hear someone likes it. Thanks again.