On Fri, 21 Jul 2006 08:09:01 -0500, MDW <MD*@discussions.microsoft.com>
wrote:
I've been working on a Web site for a business (my first non-personal
site) and I want to help my client get the best search engine listing.
You can use Poodle Predictor to get an idea of how your site looks to a
search engine. If the site isn't navigable with that, you probably won't
see very good results regardless of the relevance of your site's
content.
http://www.gritechnologies.com/tools/spider.go
Also, look into the Web Accessibility Initiative's guidelines. If you
follow them, you tend to get a spider-friendly site in addition to the
obvious advantages.
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
1) What do I need to do in order to actually GET a page listed in a
search engine to begin with? Do I contact the search engines somehow,
or are the listings somehow updated automatically.
Search engines can usually discover new sites on their own if there is a
link from an existing site that they are indexing, but I think you'll
find it more expedient to use their submission process. I've included
links for the forms for Google, Yahoo and MSN. For other search engines,
you can usually find it on their "About" or "Contact" pages.
http://www.google.com/addurl/ http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx?FORM=WSDD2
2) I've seen tips that advise putting meta keywords, etc., on EVERY
page on the site. However, we want users to only come to the site via
the "front door" - the index page. I don't see much reason to put a
bunch of keywords on a page that might be the third part of an
application process - coming to the site on that page would cause
visitors to be confused. If I limited the search engine keywords to
just the index page, would that hurt the listing?
I'm not aware of any search engine that takes meta keywords into
consideration. They were heavily abused pretty much from inception.
Unless you want to use them internally in some capacity, there's really
no reason to put them on any page, let alone every page.
I would also suggest that you consider carefully where to employ the
requirement that visitors arrive by way of the "front door". The third
page of an application form probably doesn't need to be indexed, but
obviously the more of your pages that are known by a search engine, the
more likely it will be that one of them will have the information your
visitors are looking for.
--
Justin Piper
Bizco Technologies
http://www.bizco.com/ 
