momma_j asked this question on 3/25/2000: Hello, I'm new to e-business. I have submitted my website to several search engines. Can you suggest the best (fastest, most efficient) way for me to find out: 1) If my site has been listed yet? 2) How my site has been rated?

I look forward to hearing from you,

Momma-j mamstore.vstorecds.com WebSite101 gave this response on 3/25/2000: Hello Mamma-j,

The best way to find out if your site is listed in a particular search engine is to visit that search engine and type in your URL in the search box. I did this for your URL in the top ten search engines and found it in only one of them. That was "Goto.com"

There are services that will monitor your placement at several of the submissions sites as well. But I recommend just visiting the engine yourself and typing your URL.

If you have only recently submitted your site to the search engines recently, plan on waiting anywhere from a week to several months to be included in their database. Some will not list your site or rate it as it is a subdomain (mamstore.vstorecds.com) and is recognized as an affiliate store.

Consider reserving your own domain name to host a page with links into your affiliate page and you will have much better luck being indexed by the search engines.

Good luck with this, it's one of the biggest ongoing tasks of e-business.

Mike Banks Valentine http://website101.com mailto:learn@website101.com

momma_j asked this follow-up question on 3/25/2000: Mike, I really appreciate the encouragement and the advice. I certainly will follow it.

You mentioned "services that will monitor your placement at several of the submissions sites..." Could you be more specific?

Thanks, Cynthia WebSite101 gave this response on 3/27/2000: Hi Cynthia,

Many of the submission services such as http://www.addme.com and http://www.selfpromotion.com offer a follow-up service (actually selfpromotion.com charges for the service, but only $10) they will monitor your position. Another service called PositionAgent.com will offer you a free trial service to monitor your positions and offers an upgrade for pay. I use Danny Sullivans http://www.searchenginewatch.com which offers links to URL check services at http://www.searchenginewatch.com/resources/checkers.html . Searchenginewatch is a great search engine resource for every aspect of submission, monitoring and optimization. Danny Sullivan also has a newsletter on the topic to keep you informed on the latest tips for improving your site ranking which you can sign up for from his site.

I hope that will get you started!

Mike Banks Valentine http://website101.com

-- Anonymous, March 23, 2001

Answers

The two posts below belong together

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2001

1. Go the site http://www.metacrawler.com/index_power.html or some other meta search engine of your choice and look up what you want your site to be found under, ie."graphic web design". Choose, "as a phrase", everywhere, timeout 2 minutes, 30 results per page, 30 results per source.

2. Save the first 3-5 sites onto your hard drive, listed that have at least 2-3 search engines finding them, not counting sites that say "paid result" for their ranking. Note the names of the search engines that found them, see step 8 below.

3. Open each web site saved using your web authoring tool, I used Netscape Composer. Look to see if the web site is copyrighted, and delete it if it is copyrighted!

4. Make a copy of your web site to work with, don't use the original version! Cut and paste the metatags (keywords and description in the raw html) of the different un-copyrighted web sites into the "head" section of a copy of your original web site, blend the tags well. Make sure you copy the description and keywords metatags into both small letters and large, ie. keywords and Keywords.

5. Delete any tags that are site specific, for instance, if their site is in Timbuktu, delete that reference from the metatag. Delete anything that would lead that site owner to say you copied his metatags. He can't say you stole the words "graphic studio" but he can if you use "Mel's fabulous graphic studio of Tulsa", so change it to "fabulous graphic studio" MAKE IT GENERIC!

6. In the site title make the main keywords you are interested in all CAPITALS with a - then the real site name. For example: FLOWER PICTURES - Mark's Flower Scans.

7. Save the COPY of your altered web page and upload it to your server, replacing your original version. If there are any problems with the new page, then re-upload the ORIGINAL unchanged version of your site.

8. Now go to the search engines that found the original sites you saved (see step #1) and register your site manually. I recommend that you DO IT YOURSELF, not use a service. The search engines that are human reviewed score highest (excite, direct hit, google, open directory project) so concentrate on them, vs. altavista or webcrawler.

9. In 2-3 weeks go to http://www.metacrawler.com/index_power.html and look up the subject you picked in step #1 above. If your site is listed on page one of the search engine results you have succeeded! Yea! Otherwise, repeat steps #1-9.

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2001

link to above

!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en" html>

head>

meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859- 1">

meta http-equiv="PICS-Label" content="(PICS-1.1">

meta name="Author" content="My name">

meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.7 [en]C-CCK-MCD NSCPCD47 (Win95; I) [Netscape]">

meta name="description" content="flower picturesMy name Freshh Flower Scans">

meta name="Description" content="Flower pictures from My name Fresh flowerscans wallpaper of roses orchids wildflowers exotics">

meta name="DESCRIPTION" content="Flower pictures and flower wallpaper and flower portraits of roses orchids wildflowers">

meta name="keywords" content="flower pictures, FLOWERS,flowers, mousepads,roses, flower, fresh flowers, roses, rose">

meta name="KeyWords" content="flower pictures,FLOWERS,wallpaper, flowers, picture, clip art, free, photography,rose,roses">

meta name="mytopic" content="Home &Living:Gardening:Flowers">

meta name="revisit-after" content="15 DAYS">

meta name="ROBOTS" content="index,follow">

meta name="Distribution" content="Global">

meta name="Rating" content="General">

meta name="Robots" content="All">

title>FLOWER PICTURES - FLOWERS - My name Fresh Flower Scans /title> /head>

-- Anonymous, March 29, 2001

We have had very good success with the top search engines.

1. Purchase Jeff B's program Peak Ratings It is a server side program that allows you to make a different page for each search engine. Available at JustAsp.com

2. Purchase WebPosition. This software has a knowledge base and can analyze your page as well as competitive pages to determine what to do to get listed higher. Also Available at JustAsp.com

3. Pick 4 or 5 keywords or phrases and concentrate on them. i.e. restaurant won't work, but restaurant equipment, and saint louis restaurant equipment would be better, and saint louis missouri restaurant equipment would be best. Google has over 6,000,000 pages for restaurant, 568,000 pages for restaurant equipment, but less than 1500 for saint louis missouri restaurant equipment. Obviously your odds of getting into the top 20 listings are a heck of a lot better if you pick keywords and phrases that target your audience.

4. Yahoo is absolutely worth it, We had a client go thru 11 months with only 1 sale for Soil Testing Services and after convincing them to sign up for yahoo they have averaged 20 sales per month.

5. Meta tags should have comma's

We would be glad to discuss our services with you, we have a lot of experience with search engine optimization and registration.

Bob Niemeier VP Marketing JustCall, Inc. 314 865-1778 marketing@justcallinc.com

-- Anonymous, April 27, 2001

submit to google

http://www.google.com/addurl.html

-- Anonymous, May 23, 2001