Web Site Building Question

BuffaloHuskey · 01-13-2006, 10:15 AM

I recently built a web site as a learning experience and to learn more about how internet marketing works. I registered my site with a bunch of search engines but the site does not show up when I run a search using the three terms in the name in quote. For instance, say my web site was named Front office football.com, if I type in "Front Office Football" the site is not showing up. I have inserted meta tags and have some words on the web site. Anyone have any idea as to what I may be forgetting.

Also if I type in the hypothetical frontofficefootball.com the site will pop up? Any feedback would be appreciated

Maple Leafs · 01-13-2006, 10:32 AM

Which search engines?

Google is based on an algorithm that measures your sites popularity, so you won't see it show up very high on Google until people start linking to you. Other sites are directory-based, so you should show up there once they've indexed you.

You can see if you've been indexed at all by google by searching for site:yourdomain.com keyword, where yourdomain.com is your site doman and keyword is some word that would appear on your site.

Cuckoo · 01-13-2006, 10:35 AM

Hmm... honestly I'm not sure how to answer this question. I would start by asking you a couple of questions.

Do you have a webhost? Is the site live on a registered domain name?

I don't mean to sound condescending, just taking care of the most obvious first.

If you have all of that, then you should be able to type in the domain name.com and the site will pop up. Keep in mind that it sometimes takes a day or two after registering, depending on your host, for the domain name to be active.

As for search engines, there are a couple things at play. One, it takes a bit of time for search engines to spider your site for display in search results. And two, the chance of your site showing up near the top of any search is largely dependent on the search terms. Words like "Britney Spears" are going to get a lot more hits than "BuffaloHuskey" for example. If your site has a unique name, you should be higher in search results than if it doesn't.

Also, there are some things you can do for search engine optimization. For example, the more sites that link to you, the higher up in searches your site will likely be.

I'm no web guru, but I hope that helps.

jeff061 · 01-13-2006, 10:38 AM

I don't know much about this either. I've spoken to an old co-worker of mine who has done a lot of search engine placement for a store he runs.

Basically he has software where he can input a competitor's URL. The software comes back with a list of other sites linking to the competitors site. He then contacts those sites and offers to trade links.

The more links to you from pages about your subject matter the higher you can get your page rank. I'm sure there are many other factors, but that's what he focuses on. He's gotten to page three on Google and page one on MSN.

jeff061 · 01-13-2006, 10:43 AM

Also try messing around with https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login

Just follow the directions to get your web page registered. Basically you need to copy a generated file to your www root directory.

Gives you some good information on your site, what searches are finding it, give google a list of pages to index, ect. Kind of cool.

BuffaloHuskey · 01-13-2006, 10:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Cuckoo

Hmm... honestly I'm not sure how to answer this question. I would start by asking you a couple of questions.

Do you have a webhost? Is the site live on a registered domain name?

I didn't take it as being condescending at all. I have a webhost and can find my site when I search for it. The name of one of my sites is www.creditsolutionsmagazine.com. I can find the site when I google the exact site name, but if I type in with quotes "Credit Solutions Magazine" on google, there are about four results and mine is not on there. I would think that since it is such a specific search that my site would show up.

As I said, I am a bit of a novice at this, and really am just trying to spur ideas. I have been lucky in the past with some of my ideas which have provided some supplemental income, and I figured I would give this a whirl as well.

At the moment I think the best way to go is to have a site which links to amazon or target or who ever to sell specific products. Since the cost of making these sites and hosting is minimal, I figured it can't hurt to try. If anything it gives me a tax write off.

Thanks for the feedback and if anyone else has ideas, I am open to it.

Maple Leafs · 01-13-2006, 10:56 AM

If you haven't already, download the google toolbar and then check your pagerank score.

It looks like google hasn't spidered your site -- they have no cache for you. How long has your site been live?

Gallifrey · 01-13-2006, 11:10 AM

It can take time for the engines to spider your site and then rank it. I find that GoogleBOT will usually hits one of my sites very soon after I submit it. But they usually will not rank it for a period of time to weed out the fly by night sites and give what they say they hope are serious sites that will be around for awhile a chance to rank.

Look on the web of WebCEO. Use that to scan your pages and tell you how to adjust it for rankings. It is the best I have used.

Validate your code at W3C.org. This will help the web robots finish reading your pages (they may choke on bad code).

Only submit it once for every few months. Don't worry, Google will find your site and spider it.

I usually go in this order;
1- Validate
2- Use WebCEO to help score higher
3- Re-validate after making the changes
4- Submit to Google. All the other engines will find you. MSN is usually the quick one.
5- Be calm and wait. It has taken one of my e-commerce sites a month to show up, and another a week to hit #1 in MSN and #4 in Google. You just never know.

BuffaloHuskey · 01-13-2006, 11:11 AM

The site has only been live for three days. I am going to use google sitemaps and hopefully that will get me spidered. I am also going to try to link to some of the other sites I am building and maybe that will move me up a little bit.

I really appreciate the feedback I am receiving. I have enjoyed this learning experience so far and I am hoping to improve my web site building skills. I have a few books I would like to order to help spruce up my sites and add some more features. In my day job I am a mergers and acquistion advisor so I am hoping that web site building will be able to provide me with an outlet for my creative side.

End of December and January are always slow for us, so this has been a great time for me to play around with this stuff

Icy · 01-13-2006, 11:43 AM

BuffaloHuskey, i do that kind of stuff as main bussines so here are some keys, but the advice would change a lot depending if you plan on doing a website about your dog pissing in the garden or about your internet company where you also plan on having income from it.

1- The top results at most of the categories that generate any possible income at all the majoy search engines are paying to be there. Depending on how serious are you about your site, you can consider it. The cost is per click. That means that you pay $X to the search engine per visitor that clicks on your link at the search engine. It's a bidding process, if you bid $0.10 per visitor and i bid $0.11, my site link will appear over yours in the search engine. That means that for some keywords the bids are so high, leading to huge expenses per month while for other keywords, you won't almost pay to be at the top as you won't have competitors overbidding you. For example, for the keyword "BuffaloHuskey's dog" you would pay close to nothing, while for "casino" keyword i pay over $12,000 per month at yahoo for example. It all depends on if you run the site as hobby or bussines, and if the later, how much you want to invest/recover.

2- You can also SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your site, adding the right keywords, meta tags etc etc, you can read a lot about it searching in google. Apart from that, the key is to have lots of sites linking at yours. The better ranked the sites linking at yours, the better will be your rank. (The rank at google can be measured using their free google toolbar that shows the pagerank for every site you visit, including yours). If you see a site related to the same content than yours, you can email the webmaster asking for a link exchange that will benefit you both.

SEO is the key to success unless you want to take the fast but expensive route of paying to be at the top. SEO is a science, the masters of it never will share their tricks with you, as they want their own sites at the top or are hired by other companies for insane $$ to optimize their websites. SEO also takes months to affect your site, you won't be listed at the search engines in 2 weeks, and it will cost you way more to be at the top if you ever reach it.

All the avobe applies to comercial sites, if you want to have a site about your dog and have 10 persons visting it per day to see how cute he is, you just need to do a little SEO and exchange links with webmasters that also own websites about their dogs. After some time, the search engines will start to show your site for the keywords that you worked on the SEO. If you play your cards right, you can even have the top result for dog pics in the web, but will take you months and work. The internet bussines is so advanced now, there are lots of ppl living from it and it's harder and harder for new webmasters to enter in it. Of course all is possible with hard work and/or money.

If you're more explicit about your site plans, i could give you more expecific advice.

BuffaloHuskey · 01-13-2006, 01:16 PM

Icy -

Thank you so much for the information. At this point I am basically trying to get traffic to my site so that people will click on advertising, but i am not looking to put much money in it nor am I expecting to make much if any money. As I said before I took on this venture as a learning experience. Since I have a full time job which requires a 55-70 hour work week, I can really only put in about ten hours per week into this project.

I will definately put in some time learning about SEO's on the internet, and hopefully will find some useful information. I have really enjoyed learning about internet advertising and building web sites. At this point in my life I look for any way possible to learn without having to commit the money or time to going back to school. (Having paid for a Bachelors and Masters Degree already, I really don't enjoy paying back my loans).

Again, thank you everybody for your input.

Icy · 01-13-2006, 01:35 PM

No problem, you can start reading tons of info at tons of SEO related websites. Nobody will teach you step by step to become a SEO master, but you can find tons of available info and teach yourself. And don't worry about going back to school, nothing about SEO or even internet marketing is taught there, 99% of webmasters are self taught including me. (I started at university but left it before finishing to fund my own internet company 6 years ago).

These are some sites to learn about SEO and to start to make contacts. Remember this, networking is the key to have success in the online bussines. With networking i mean knowing everybody related to your bussines, so you can exchange knowledge and websites links. Read all that you can at this places, there is huge knowledge there.

http://www.searchengineforums.com/
http://www.seochat.com/

Also download and install the google toolbar with the extended options that includes the Pagerank checker so you can know how ranked is every website that you visit. Visit the high ranked ones and learn what they are doing.

http://toolbar.google.com/

01-13-2006, 10:32 AM	#2
Maple Leafs Coordinator Join Date: Jan 2002	Which search engines? Google is based on an algorithm that measures your sites popularity, so you won't see it show up very high on Google until people start linking to you. Other sites are directory-based, so you should show up there once they've indexed you. You can see if you've been indexed at all by google by searching for site:yourdomain.com keyword, where yourdomain.com is your site doman and keyword is some word that would appear on your site. __________________ Down Goes Brown: Toronto Maple Leafs Humor and Analysis

01-13-2006, 10:35 AM	#3
Cuckoo College Starter Join Date: Oct 2000 Location: Edmond, OK	Hmm... honestly I'm not sure how to answer this question. I would start by asking you a couple of questions. Do you have a webhost? Is the site live on a registered domain name? I don't mean to sound condescending, just taking care of the most obvious first. If you have all of that, then you should be able to type in the domain name.com and the site will pop up. Keep in mind that it sometimes takes a day or two after registering, depending on your host, for the domain name to be active. As for search engines, there are a couple things at play. One, it takes a bit of time for search engines to spider your site for display in search results. And two, the chance of your site showing up near the top of any search is largely dependent on the search terms. Words like "Britney Spears" are going to get a lot more hits than "BuffaloHuskey" for example. If your site has a unique name, you should be higher in search results than if it doesn't. Also, there are some things you can do for search engine optimization. For example, the more sites that link to you, the higher up in searches your site will likely be. I'm no web guru, but I hope that helps. __________________ Commissioner - North American Football League Dallas Cowboys GM

01-13-2006, 10:43 AM	#5
jeff061 Grizzled Veteran Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: MA	Also try messing around with https://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/login Just follow the directions to get your web page registered. Basically you need to copy a generated file to your www root directory. Gives you some good information on your site, what searches are finding it, give google a list of pages to index, ect. Kind of cool. __________________

01-13-2006, 10:56 AM	#7
Maple Leafs Coordinator Join Date: Jan 2002	If you haven't already, download the google toolbar and then check your pagerank score. It looks like google hasn't spidered your site -- they have no cache for you. How long has your site been live? __________________ Down Goes Brown: Toronto Maple Leafs Humor and Analysis

01-13-2006, 11:11 AM	#9
BuffaloHuskey Mascot Join Date: Aug 2005	The site has only been live for three days. I am going to use google sitemaps and hopefully that will get me spidered. I am also going to try to link to some of the other sites I am building and maybe that will move me up a little bit. I really appreciate the feedback I am receiving. I have enjoyed this learning experience so far and I am hoping to improve my web site building skills. I have a few books I would like to order to help spruce up my sites and add some more features. In my day job I am a mergers and acquistion advisor so I am hoping that web site building will be able to provide me with an outlet for my creative side. End of December and January are always slow for us, so this has been a great time for me to play around with this stuff __________________ "Buffalo is the grundle of the weather system" -T-Shirt

01-13-2006, 10:38 AM	#4
jeff061 Grizzled Veteran Join Date: Nov 2003 Location: MA	I don't know much about this either. I've spoken to an old co-worker of mine who has done a lot of search engine placement for a store he runs. Basically he has software where he can input a competitor's URL. The software comes back with a list of other sites linking to the competitors site. He then contacts those sites and offers to trade links. The more links to you from pages about your subject matter the higher you can get your page rank. I'm sure there are many other factors, but that's what he focuses on. He's gotten to page three on Google and page one on MSN. __________________ Last edited by jeff061 : 01-13-2006 at 10:39 AM.

01-13-2006, 11:10 AM	#8
Gallifrey High School Varsity Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: Seattle, Washington	It can take time for the engines to spider your site and then rank it. I find that GoogleBOT will usually hits one of my sites very soon after I submit it. But they usually will not rank it for a period of time to weed out the fly by night sites and give what they say they hope are serious sites that will be around for awhile a chance to rank. Look on the web of WebCEO. Use that to scan your pages and tell you how to adjust it for rankings. It is the best I have used. Validate your code at W3C.org. This will help the web robots finish reading your pages (they may choke on bad code). Only submit it once for every few months. Don't worry, Google will find your site and spider it. I usually go in this order; 1- Validate 2- Use WebCEO to help score higher 3- Re-validate after making the changes 4- Submit to Google. All the other engines will find you. MSN is usually the quick one. 5- Be calm and wait. It has taken one of my e-commerce sites a month to show up, and another a week to hit #1 in MSN and #4 in Google. You just never know.

01-13-2006, 11:43 AM	#10
Icy Pro Starter Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Toledo - Spain	BuffaloHuskey, i do that kind of stuff as main bussines so here are some keys, but the advice would change a lot depending if you plan on doing a website about your dog pissing in the garden or about your internet company where you also plan on having income from it. 1- The top results at most of the categories that generate any possible income at all the majoy search engines are paying to be there. Depending on how serious are you about your site, you can consider it. The cost is per click. That means that you pay $X to the search engine per visitor that clicks on your link at the search engine. It's a bidding process, if you bid $0.10 per visitor and i bid $0.11, my site link will appear over yours in the search engine. That means that for some keywords the bids are so high, leading to huge expenses per month while for other keywords, you won't almost pay to be at the top as you won't have competitors overbidding you. For example, for the keyword "BuffaloHuskey's dog" you would pay close to nothing, while for "casino" keyword i pay over $12,000 per month at yahoo for example. It all depends on if you run the site as hobby or bussines, and if the later, how much you want to invest/recover. 2- You can also SEO (Search Engine Optimization) your site, adding the right keywords, meta tags etc etc, you can read a lot about it searching in google. Apart from that, the key is to have lots of sites linking at yours. The better ranked the sites linking at yours, the better will be your rank. (The rank at google can be measured using their free google toolbar that shows the pagerank for every site you visit, including yours). If you see a site related to the same content than yours, you can email the webmaster asking for a link exchange that will benefit you both. SEO is the key to success unless you want to take the fast but expensive route of paying to be at the top. SEO is a science, the masters of it never will share their tricks with you, as they want their own sites at the top or are hired by other companies for insane $$ to optimize their websites. SEO also takes months to affect your site, you won't be listed at the search engines in 2 weeks, and it will cost you way more to be at the top if you ever reach it. All the avobe applies to comercial sites, if you want to have a site about your dog and have 10 persons visting it per day to see how cute he is, you just need to do a little SEO and exchange links with webmasters that also own websites about their dogs. After some time, the search engines will start to show your site for the keywords that you worked on the SEO. If you play your cards right, you can even have the top result for dog pics in the web, but will take you months and work. The internet bussines is so advanced now, there are lots of ppl living from it and it's harder and harder for new webmasters to enter in it. Of course all is possible with hard work and/or money. If you're more explicit about your site plans, i could give you more expecific advice.

01-13-2006, 01:16 PM	#11
BuffaloHuskey Mascot Join Date: Aug 2005	Icy - Thank you so much for the information. At this point I am basically trying to get traffic to my site so that people will click on advertising, but i am not looking to put much money in it nor am I expecting to make much if any money. As I said before I took on this venture as a learning experience. Since I have a full time job which requires a 55-70 hour work week, I can really only put in about ten hours per week into this project. I will definately put in some time learning about SEO's on the internet, and hopefully will find some useful information. I have really enjoyed learning about internet advertising and building web sites. At this point in my life I look for any way possible to learn without having to commit the money or time to going back to school. (Having paid for a Bachelors and Masters Degree already, I really don't enjoy paying back my loans). Again, thank you everybody for your input. __________________ "Buffalo is the grundle of the weather system" -T-Shirt Last edited by BuffaloHuskey : 01-13-2006 at 01:16 PM.

01-13-2006, 01:35 PM	#12
Icy Pro Starter Join Date: Sep 2003 Location: Toledo - Spain	No problem, you can start reading tons of info at tons of SEO related websites. Nobody will teach you step by step to become a SEO master, but you can find tons of available info and teach yourself. And don't worry about going back to school, nothing about SEO or even internet marketing is taught there, 99% of webmasters are self taught including me. (I started at university but left it before finishing to fund my own internet company 6 years ago). These are some sites to learn about SEO and to start to make contacts. Remember this, networking is the key to have success in the online bussines. With networking i mean knowing everybody related to your bussines, so you can exchange knowledge and websites links. Read all that you can at this places, there is huge knowledge there. http://www.searchengineforums.com/ http://www.seochat.com/ Also download and install the google toolbar with the extended options that includes the Pagerank checker so you can know how ranked is every website that you visit. Visit the high ranked ones and learn what they are doing. http://toolbar.google.com/ Last edited by Icy : 01-13-2006 at 01:38 PM.

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