Lesson #2: Submitting Your Site

One of the cooler things about getting indexed is that usually you don't have to submit - in time, Google will find you.

But if you're in a rush and need to get your fresh, raw, virgin URL listed ASAP, and want to make sure the other major SEs "see" you, then you can go through these simple steps...

To submit to Google, the first thing to do and the simplest is to go to Google in another country, a smaller engine, which is likely to index your submission much sooner than the .com or .ca version...

Pick Israel, for example: http://www.google.co.il/addurl/.

The first field on that page is "Address of site". Simple enough, just enter your site's URL with the http part included.

The Second field is for comments, which is optional and really isn't needed. Ignore it. Click the button. It must say something like "Submit Site"; I never really translated.

That's it. You've submitted to Google, which will index the Israel version of its search engine sooner than it would have your site submitted to the .com version.

Don't do it again - you won't have to. Sit still. Be patient. Play golf.

Or, you can submit your site to be listed in link lists and top lists, etc., but I don't recommend reciprocal linking. Best to submit to a search tool or directory site which needs listings and doesn't require you to link back to them... although, initially for indexation purposes, you may not care, it means more work taking the links down off your site when you will have to.

(The reason for this is many-fold but basically one of the main reasons is that if you have or plan to have an affiliate program, your affiliates will not want to link to you if you give their traffic a chance to leave your site before they can join.)

If you can't build up immediate linking relationships (which should be the subject of an entire entry of its own here) then there is a simple solution, but you have to keep it up daily for a few days, and that's link dumps.

Yes, I know the knowledgeable of you out there will say link dumps suck. And they do, for traffic... but some indexed so often and basically because they change so often, that the chances are good you'll be picked up by Google and MSN and Yahoo at these sites.

For adult sites, you can go to a list of link dumps, and for non-adult it would be good to go to FFA sites like Squizzle (http://www.squizzle.com/linkdump.asp), The Lost Links (http://www.thelostlinks.com/ ), or best are places you don't have to register or wait for approval, such as MediaDrpper (http://www.mediadropper.com).

These are never guaranteed but might work if you're in a hurry. Best would be to link to yourself from sites of your own, especially blogs you update regularly and other text-content sites.

This will end for now so I can publish... I'll re-read it tomorrow and see if it needs to be edited... oh, and of course there's submitting to MSN and Yahoo! of course....

And now, back to our regularly scheduled program

Ok I'm back and will re-begin posting on this blog regularly now that things have fallen in line at the day job and there is more room to ... breathe....

Stay tuned!

A New SEO Beginning for This Blog - and lesson #1: Getting Indexed

Well whattaya want... I can't just keep looking for contests to lose, I DO have a job to do, ya know...

Anyhow part of it involves this, now, one of our new clients needing some site optimization and submission done for him.

SEO is not a science, nor is it some wizardry the gurus will have us believe... rather, it's an intuitive, creative way to get a site which otherwise may be off the mark in terms of relevancy to search engines back ON the mark...

But before i get into these soft-headed abstractions, I gotta say the deal is to get the site Indexed to begin with.

First thing to do is fill in the header tags - those things in the page code which serve a nebulous purpose on some search engines, or a specific purpose - depending on the engine.

For this reason best to keep it simple. The less the better. So what you need are: title, keyword, description, and robots tags.

I also like to add the imagetoolbar tag, set to "no", because I hate it when that little menu pops up over images offering that I can email, etc... the thing to someone. I also suspect it probably helps harvesting for hotlink bots...

If you don't know what that means, forget it... or rather, wait for later...

Then within the index page - which is the first that gets indexed - I like to add creative, descriptive body text ABOVE the warning, Enter or Exit links, copyright notices, etc....

The reason for this is that a listing in some search engines will reach for the first text on the body or human-viewable part of the page rather than the meta-description.

It's also a good idea to have part of that text in <> (not h2 or h3, but h1) - if you don't like the size of it, preformat the h1 on that page (or throughout the site via css document).

My idea is that all these elements help guide the search engine's user agent through your site page, and eventually through your site. It is basically looking for content in the form of text - which by the way is the reason to have "alt" descriptions on all your images).

The thing goes through the title, searches for relevance in the keywords, the brief description and on to the header or main element of the body of the page. Then it saunters through the body text and finally hits the links on the page to see if they're relevant... but that's it. It doesn't follow through.

The first time, SE's usually only survey the index page and then go on to other sites. But they do come back. Especially if you have links. Especially if you tell them to...

What? TELL Googlebot to come back? No, of course not, you don't tell it what to do, really (which is why all these back-dated content-expiry tags and others in the genre are a waste of time and plain dumb). What you DO tell it is in the robots tag.

The robots tag is the shortest piece of work in the headers. Basically, you just set it to "index" if you want to have your site spidered entirely. If there's anything you don't want indexed for whatever reason, that's another lesson. Suffice it to say that you have tell it to "index" and when the spider/bot returns it will first quickly check if your index page content is updated (which is a good thing) and will then follow through on the links, and on into the site.

I suspect and it's logical to assume that each visit will take the engine deeper into the page until eventually the whole site is indexed... but how do you make it index your site the FIRST TIME???

Well, if you do NOTHING you will sooner or later be indexed. But it helps to have a few things up your sleeve, a few places to submit, and a few links already on some pages which are indexed.

But... more on that next time :)

JeeDubDubbed Over Google

Ok, it's the same as last time with pointenslutten, Google seems to ignore blogger sites for a while, taking in for example the JeeDubDub page at iSN News before ever touching the JeeDubDub Blog - it's not even in a JeeDubDub BlogSearch yet!

Checking the results of Thumbshots of JeeDubDub and Google vs MSN is most satisfying, as the page is pretty much ranked higher than I'd expected it to be, though I'll have to check winning dates and so forth before I get too excited.

Weirdly enough, Yahoo (Inktomi) has indexed and listed the index page, as well as a link page for surfers that contains a JeeDubDub link, but not the JeeDubDub page itself.

That could be because the JeeDubDub page was originally indexed as the PointenSlutten SEO page, and Inktomi indexes different parts of sites at different times, hop-skipping the ones it did last time...

Anyhow off to JeeDubDub the closeing date and hope to hit #1...

If you need to check JeeDubDub on Google between posts to this Blog, click there...

Getting Images Indexed - not pertinent to JeeDubDub

This has nothing to do with JeeDubDub (damn that's hard to type) but rather with the Webdreams site I'm building to track and capitalize on the success of the Showcase Television docu-soap series about 2much.net, Dugmor, Malezia, and others in the online adult trade.

I'm trying to get images indexed and appearing on image searches for "webdreams" but so far nada. I managed to get all kinds of images indexed before (run a search for "chat hostess" in Google, you'll see the first results are ours), but without ever bothering to check on the lapse of time.

So far there's nothing from the show on Google image search for the term "webdreams" though if you add "Galafilm" (the company that produced the series) you get a one-image result.

The name on the image doesn't seem to matter, as long as it appears on a page illustrating text relevant to the search. So if you have a picture of kittens on a page about dogs, Google will return a picture of kittens when you run an image search for the "dogs".

The lessons are accumulating, the knowledge is seeping in. JeeDubDub!!

JeeDubDub Updates, Links, and Compliancy

All right, so now this site is compliant with The Terms and Conditions of the JeeDubDub SEO effort at GayWideWebmasters.

The SEO page at iSN News has been revised to include JeeDubDub and help rank this page and blog to that subject. A very peculiar word, as the Nigritude Ultramarine was, but hopefully content and not the word alone or its repetition and page-stuffing will suffice to head this page to the top of the rankings.

However it is a slow go, and there are some who were quick on the registration and got themselves a JeeDubDub domain name. Good for them...

While this page is ranked nowhere yet, the JeeDubDub page at iSN is already Ranked on Yahoo and AltaVista; here's the Thumbshots JeeDubDub Ranking comparison of that race.

Here Are some Quick JeeDubDub Links and searches for those interested in the rankings of each participant's efforts:

JeeDubDub At Yahoo

JeeDubDub On Google

JeeDubDub At MSN

JeeDubDub - sounds delightful.

This is the word a NEW search engine optimization competition wants us all to stick to number one on Google.

So there.

JeeDubDub.

I wonder if capitalization will count...

Anyhow look out for more. This Blog is about to change titles, me thinks...