Google

How do you get your website up on Google? I need to advertise a mates website for him, he wants it on google, he just wants to put it in the search engine of google.

[Paul K]

http://www.google.co.uk/addurl/?hl=en&continue=/addurl
Then you need to make the site attractive to googles search engine itself

Dont really need to bother with adding the site to google manually, chances are the crawlers will get to your site before the add url does.

Do not use automatic submitters who claim to submit your site to every search engine. These do not work effectively and cause your site to be penalized quite heavily by some search engines (i.e lower than deserved listing)

The first thing you have to do is have a good <title> tag. Make it clear (it will appear at the top of the browser, I.E Mine is currently Google - Cable Forum.

Next is a good meta description, this is what will appear under your title in the listings. Make sure its short, to the point and honest but make sure it is accurately describing your site and contains keywords the user is likely to search for (i.e A site about simpsons would have "A site following the Simpsons and all the other fun stuff they do") lame example but notice the use of the keyword simpson.

Good meta tags. None of these are a magic formula but they help. Meta tags is where to contain your keywords. Think of every possible word that your user would type too find your site and put these into the keywords (include misspellings)

Here is a example of some code:

<title>Damien O'Neill</title> put your title in these tags
<meta name="Keywords" content="Damien O'Neill blog kent damian oneill " />Keywords here
<meta name="Description" content="Personal Site and Blog for Damien O'Neill" />Description here

These go about the body tag in your HTML.

Talking of HTML search engines can and do take notice of bad code, they are only machines so the better and more valid your code is, the better chance you have of getting a good ranking. Ensure your code is complaint with W3 standards and if it uses CSS, CSS.

This is the link for the validator put your site in there to check and fix any problems: http://validator.w3.org/

PM if you have any trouble with your code here.

Your website content needs to be good, and ensure the first paragraph of your index.htm file contains the keywords as often as possible without making it spam. Clever writing is required here again using the simpsons example:

Welcome to the Simpsons! Or more accurately the best Simpsons website on the internet. Following the story of Springfield's favorite yellow family: Homer Simpson, Marge Simpson, Lisa Simpson, Bart Simpson and Maggie Simpson

Notice all the keywords yet it still makes sense for the user who will not notice any trickery here. It is important to ensure it is relevant to your website and not spamming the engine.

Also Google likes sites that update often.

Finally, Get your site listed as many times as possible. Put it where ever you can including directories such as: http://www.dmoz.org/. Ensure you are not spamming but get your site linked to! The more relevant the site is to yours the better as well. Get friends to link to your site and find as many ways as possible of getting your site linked to. This is the most important part! Also make sure the link is relevant IE Name the link the name of your site instead of www.cableforum.co.uk use: Cable Forum

If you do al these then wait or week or so and start searching for your site. It should have been noticed by now and will be slowly making its way up Google.

All of these steps are important for a good ranking so i recommend you do all of them. Also at the end of the day it is the quality of the site that will matter as this will generate the most links.

PM/Post if you need any more help, or help with above steps. It would help to see your site to give better advice

---------- Post added at 09:56 ---------- Previous post was at 09:20 ----------

Originally Posted by Nidge

How do you get your website up on Google? I need to advertise a mates website for him, he wants it on google, he just wants to put it in the search engine of google.

Missed the second bit, The way engines work to get a good place on google you would make it attractive to other engines as well. So it is not really possible to be only listed on google, not that it makes much sense to be anyway

[j52c]

Originally Posted by Nidge

How do you get your website up on Google? I need to advertise a mates website for him, he wants it on google, he just wants to put it in the search engine of google.

Some very good tips from Damien and well worth your while to follow them.

Getting listed at dmoz.org is a must as then your site will be picked up by most directory listing sites, and some you may never have heard of, but it helps to up your link ranking. It can take a couple of weeks or even months now to get on dmoz as all submissions are handled by volunteers done manually.

Create a site map for your site and put a link to it on the bottom of every page so the search engine robots can follow and index all your site. A site map is just a page with a link to all your other pages.

Use the H1 H2 H3 tags which include your main keywords. A good idea when using these is to set the size of the font using CSS because as you may know, the H1 tag is a large font and looks out of place on a page.
example:- (the code has to be inside the Style tag )

h1 {
font-size: 12pt;
font-weight: bold;
color: #536daf;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
}

Google uses the H tags to determine the content of sites now.

There are a lot of things you can do to help but take your time and with a little effort you can achieve a lot.

[handyman]

Originally Posted by Damien

Finally, Get your site listed as many times as possible. Put it where ever you can including directories such as: http://www.dmoz.org/. Ensure you are not spamming but get your site linked to! The more relevant the site is to yours the better as well. Get friends to link to your site and find as many ways as possible of getting your site linked to. This is the most important part! Also make sure the link is relevant IE Name the link the name of your site instead of www.cableforum.co.uk use: Cable Forum

An addition to this is to make the link text the relevent part , Rather than use Cable Forum you should use Support for cable modems . This is the same principle used by google bombers to generate traffic to sites.

Get a decent real time stat counter like www.stacounter.com This will show you the traffic through your site in real time and allow you to modify your keywords to help raise you up the goggle ranks.

Some good tools here including a simulator so you can view you site like a search engine. I like the keyword density checker and run it on mine and competitors sites to see how they shape up.

[Gareth]

You might want to tell your friend to consider using the following free service from Google...

Google Sitemaps is an easy way for you to submit all your URLs to the Google index and obtain detailed reports about the visibility of your pages on Google. With Google Sitemaps, you can automatically keep us informed of all your web pages, and when you make changes to these pages to help improve your coverage in the Google crawl.

With Google Sitemaps you get:
Better crawl coverage and fresher search results to help people find more of your web pages.
A smarter crawl because you can tell us when a page was last modified or how frequently a page changes.
Detailed reports to learn more about how Google directs traffic to your site and how the Googlebot sees your pages.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Originally Posted by handyman

Get a decent real time stat counter like www.stacounter.com This will show you the traffic through your site in real time and allow you to modify your keywords to help raise you up the goggle ranks.

hehe, http://www.google.com/analytics/

Googles taking over the world