The Other Search Engines

**exudotcom** · 07-16-2002, 09:56 PM

Are manual free submissions of websites to search engines or directories still relevant? I read somewhere that most directories won't consider those kind of submission anymore...

**Hope** · 07-17-2002, 10:45 AM

ODP, Alta Vista, AllTheWeb and Inktomi still accept free submissions.

Yahoo will only if the site is not commercial.

Google gets sites from ODP.

**dvduval** · 07-17-2002, 11:12 AM

Nearly all search engines will find and list you if there are links from other sites to yours (Example: my signature links to my sites in this post). It's best to have incoming links from sites in the same topic area as yours. As the number of links increases, you are likely to see your site get higher rankings with the search engines.

Though not a proven fact, many believe that search engines totally ignore free submission requests. Exception: www.dmoz.com. I would recommend going ahead and submitting to DMOZ. One other: www.goguides.org

**exudotcom** · 07-17-2002, 01:53 PM

I did not about that signatures could be counting when search engines scrawl the web for incoming links to a certain website. so basically all those websites with a lot of traffic where i am asked to put information in profile and that this profile include a cool link section or a home page section, are occasions for me to increase popularity of my website?

Wow great!

**exudotcom** · 07-17-2002, 01:54 PM

So my question will be : What can i achieve if starting a lil community website, i still do not have a budget to pay for search engines garanteed listing etc...

**exudotcom** · 07-17-2002, 02:39 PM

Ok huh by the way why is my signature link non clickable, how can i have html enabled in my signature? Do i ahve to reach a certain level of membership?

**dvduval** · 07-17-2002, 07:48 PM

Looks like you figured out how to get the link to work in your signature, Here is an example: I use spaces. Take them out when you do it:
[ u r l = h t t p : / / w w w . yoursite . com ] Text here [ / u r l ]

Remember, links in forums are short term. I would recommend visiting other rap and soul music sites and asking them if they will exchange links with you. For example, I notice that the top site for 'soul music' on Google has about 100 incoming links. If you get 200, maybe you will be first! Of course, there are other factors, but this is a start.

**exudotcom** · 07-18-2002, 05:30 AM

This is precious knowledge, thank you
I was lready thinking about paying bla bla
but before doing that, i might try to get the most of free search engine marketing, someone recomended me to read some articles at sitepoint.com and i might do so and try to build a lil startegy for a free and smart search engine campaign...

**Hope** · 07-18-2002, 05:05 PM

It is very important to start with the search engines. What David told you about links from other related sites are also very important. I would not recommend signing up with FFA sites (search engines hate these) or going around and entering your information and website URL into everyone's guestbook or things like that.

When you put your URL out there, think about where you are putting it. Your URL represents you. What do you want people to think about your and your site? If you want people to think you are an authority or the best site for the info, then you need to have your Internet presence show that.

Remember it is going to take some time before you get some great traffic. It is not impossible to do it, but you need the patience.

**exudotcom** · 07-18-2002, 07:16 PM

I am trying to build alliances with some urban entertainment website and promoters who are authority here in Canada and maybe some in the Us.

I ahve already got some proposition of partnership from two radios and other websites and i am trying to make up my mind on that as not all of them have good looking websites but at least they have more traffic than i do...

anyway in alliances what should be the most important just the traffic of a website or a both traffic and its look and feel...

**exudotcom** · 07-18-2002, 07:26 PM

i don't seee them as really good anyway, but just want to know if they bring a lil bit of traffic?

**exudotcom** · 07-19-2002, 03:07 AM

For what i have red in this thread, would it be naive to say that free sumbission is not yet dead, but to achieve maximum ranking very fast you have to open your wallet...

**dvduval** · 09:49 AM

Quote:

but to achieve maximum ranking very fast you have to open your wallet...

To appear in the sposored results for AOL, MSN, Yahoo you need to pay Overture. Note: recently the FTC has given an ultimatum that search engines must clearly label paid results. The answer is yes, but please keep reading, because long lasting benefits are what you should be after. If you start working hard on what I have outlined below, you'll start to see results in 30-90 days (sounds like a weight loss commercial, doesn't it?)

It is definitely possible to get high rankings without paying, however. First, build a great site and load it with great content. Don't expect to do incredibly well when your site only has 6 pages of content. Instead, build hundreds if not thousands of pages of content (and stop worrying yourself about the search engines so much). If you have hundreds of pages of quality content, you will surely be listed well for some keywords. Don't forget to build a good navigation structure with every page linking back to the homepage.

Second, make sure people of similar interest find out about it. If they don't already have a link to your site, ask them for one.

Submitting to guestbooks and forums to gain incoming links isn't worth the effort. Reason: Google amd others give votes to your site more credit when they are from sources with a high page rank (have incoming links themselves). It is rare to see a guestbook or internal forum page with a high page rank. Google seems to be mostly filtering these types of incoming links these days.

Additionally, the more links a page has 'outgoing' the less value each link has as a vote for the other site. Forum and guestbook pages tend to have lots of such links, reducing the value of each individual link. The main value is more to get found rather than to get high rank. Note: there may be some value, but very litle in most cases.

**DaveTodd** · 07-19-2002, 10:26 AM

to get ranked well on search engines, work on it as you go along.
every new page you create, make it a standard procedure to insert keywords and description tags.
make the title tag relevant to the page and to your site.
ensure that every image has an alt image tag (these are indexed and weighted by the search engines), make the tags relevant to whichever market you're aiming for.
use heading commands whereever applicable, H1 and H2 are ranked highly by search engines as particularly relevant to what your site is about.
mention your keywords as much as is reasonably possible within the first 2 paragraphs of your site, as these are the "important" paragraphs for rankings.
but, keep mentioning the keywords through the page, so that the engines are reassured that your content is like that.

avoid things that will get you blacklisted such as:
keywords that don't appear anywhere else on the page
repetitive use of keyword tags, once is enough, twice is pushing it
spamming with repetitive words in long lists (ie sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex sex) just to try and get a high ranking for popular search terms

also try and avoid frames if you can. if you must use them, ensure that you have <noframes > tags so that spiders can still "see" something on your page. if you use a browser check, ensure there is something on the check page, again for spiders.
ensure your site is easy to navigate as far as possible.

swap links with reputable, high traffic, relevant sites. this significantly boosts your rankings. relevance is good, popularity is good, both combined is better.

all simple things, but when combined they are incrediably poweful and can easily propel you to good rankings. so many sites don't employ the simple things, they can have the most content in the world, but who cares if you can't find it?
only, i think 20% of sites use meta-tags. if you use them, you've already got 80% beat. if you employ the rest of the techniques, that goes up to more like 95%, and you're site will benefit...provided you target the right keywords.

directory submission is very important. if you submit to the directories and get a good ranking there, you'll shoot up in the search engines. gateway pages can be useful, but you need pages that link to them (even if the links are css'd out) in order to get them spidered and ranked well.

this is just a brief introduction to the world of search engine optomisation, i would be glad to elaborate further. have a dabble on my contact us page and i'll give you some more info, or arrange something more permanent, and i'll do it for you

**exudotcom** · 07-19-2002, 02:30 PM

Thanks for the two previous messages, the word of search engines can be very mysterious when you just begin and it seems like a lot of those webmaster help website out there won't name any, are kind of selling the idea of paying for high rankings etc...Do they get benefit from that or what ?

Ok my site is made with php CMS a well known open source one if i can name it lol... I am wondering if php generated pages have problem being indexed by spiders or S.E.? cause i was just using a fine tuning tools online to check if i had all the meta tags ( keywords, description, etc...) in the appropriate fashion and this tool will tell me that i do not have meta tags for description and keywords, those keywords are suppodsed to be generated by the cms itself...and in fact The tag for title is seen by the fine tuning toll but the other no...???
Another question is about redirection, do S.e. dislike redirection like for example my index.htm page redirect to a page in my main folder wich is my real homepage in index.php? Is it wrong s.e. wise to do such a thing?

thanks for thge help...
and i will anyway start worrying more about my content...

**conkermaniac** · 07-19-2002, 03:29 PM

Hi exudotcom,

Feel free to share this PHP CMS with us. It's not against the forum's rules at all!

I agree with others that you should work on improving your site content, and possibly, as a result, more webmasters will link to your site, as a result. This indeed is very helpful to improving your search engine optimization, at least from what I've discovered from other people.

I believe that there is a way to make your index.php your main page, isn't there? You should avoid a redirection as best as possible for the sole reason that redirection pages won't be able to hold much content. I also believe that some search engines ignore redirections, don't they? I'm not sure about this, so don't quote me on it.

**exudotcom** · 07-19-2002, 04:06 PM

Ohh the cms is the infamous or famous postnuke.com
i was scared to be like i am doing advertisement for a product or something however it is open source so no benfit for anybody...

I will go on with site content, i think i am on the good way as after a lil week of existence i am already receiving partnership proposition from website in thr urban culture movement, it ranges from events promoters, independant labels, urban radios etc... which might have some interest in exposure with my website etc...

ok i had a question also about keywords which was: limit number of keywords that is generally accepted by most s.e. and directories? and is this considered like spamming repetition in the keyword tags: urban music, urban culture, urban radio? I mean three times the same words associated with other is it spam?

For the index.php page i really want to find a solution or should i just submit my urbanish.com/urbanish/html/index.php page to directories?

**DaveTodd** · 07-19-2002, 06:19 PM

index.php overrides .htm, .html and .shtml extensions (or should do on most web hosts)
using keyword PHRASES is different from using keywords on their own. putting sex,sex,sex is spamming, putting sex toys, sex stories, sex - is not, because they are three instances of the same word, but in differnt phrases
search engines don't follow php, or javascript, so they won't follow the redirection. thats why on the redirect page you should always still have a <body > tag with content in and a direct html-style link through to your homepage for the bots and spiders to work through to make sure that they reach and spider your website, otherwise you may as well go throw pebbles at your shoes

**exudotcom** · 07-19-2002, 06:23 PM

Yes my index.html page have a body tag with a the name of the website and the slogan, will it be inapropriate if for example on that same page i put like 300 words or more of visible text simply describing the website....?

The problem is that if i put my index.php on my root www directory this will change almost everything and i will be obliged to change almost everydirectory path etc...

**DaveTodd** · 07-19-2002, 06:26 PM

are you not using templates?
its not unreasonable to put lots of visible text on the index page. using text the same colour as the background can get you blacklisted by search engines for spamming so be warned!!
templates would make updating alot easier.
go for it with the description text, but make it RELEVANT. make sure you review EVERY sentance so that it IS appropriate, if its not needed, it'll dilute your content and you'll suffer because of it